MAHER SHALAL HASH BAZ-RETURN VISIT TO ROCK MASS, 3xLP BOXSET, 1996, JAPAN

The extraordinary second release by this semi-legendary Japanese underground troupe was this sprawling (and I do mean sprawling...there's well over 2 1/2 hours of music here) 3 LP boxset concurrently issued as a 3xCD set as well and it's without a doubt one of the cornerstone documents of Japanese outsider musical thought of the last 15 years. Spearheaded by longtime Japanese underground mover Tori Kudo, who emerged from the same Minor club environs as did Keiji Haino, Kousokuya and a good bit of the PSF-endorsed noise psych crowd, MHSB have latterly gained a goodly bit of exposure via releases on Pastels member Stephen McRobbie's Geographic label, collaborations with Bill Wells and a handful of well received international festival appearances. The approach of most western reviewers has been almost uniformly to celebrate MSHB as a wholly unprecedented phenomenon, something that those of you who've scoped out the work I've previously posted from both Pungo and Katra Turana will know just ain't so, both having set the stage for this sort of whimsical and wheezily askew theatrical rock fragmentation. Kudo's masterstroke was in mating this modality to a poignant and (for all their calculated "offness") flawless command of the syntax of garage-y West Coast psych, with a superficially naif Cornell box-like fragility morphing in a few wobbly bars into uncannily accurate approximations of the sorta fuzz psych bombers that could have been pulled straight from the grooves of a Nuggets comp. It's an aesthetic that sees no problem with integrating everything from delicately shaded Pascal Comelade-like miniatures to surf guitar and the limply pastel and winsome with sojourns into the sort of detuned circus-y quease that Tom Waits started getting at circa Frank's Wild Years, with off key tubas and euphoniums affably wheezing and parping away with all the earnest effort of a first year school orchestra.


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