Ozric Tentacles - The Yum Yum Tree
by Dan Upton
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I was only loosely familiar with Ozric Tentacles, having heard a handful of songs, prior to grabbing this CD. Given that they've released in the neighborhood of 30 albums since their formation in 1984, that means I might be missing a lot of prior context. Keeping that in mind, take the rest of my thoughts on the band as you will.Ozric Tentacles are sometimes considered "space rock," and it doesn't take long into opening track "Magick Valley" to see that might be a reasonable genre description. Drawing heavily from early jazz rock fusion and instrumental rock, Ozric Tentacles combine live guitar, bass, and percussion with synthesizers and electronic drums into spacey textures and frequent shreddy solos. Exotic instruments and synthesizer leads and riffs abound, sometimes just as backdrop and sometimes driving the song. "Magick Valley" has one section about halfway through with middle eastern instrumentation. "Oddweird" has a section with what sounds like a Japanese koto. "Oolong, Oolong" has a pervasive, sort of squelchy synthesizer which moves back and forth in the stereo field as the main theme at the beginning. "Plant Music" has a very trance-like synthesizer motif at the beginning. The biggest problem with the album is, as my cousin once described another album, is that "it's a good...song." You could say that it's just a common thread running through all of the songs, but even if repeated rhythms, sounds, and motifs are intentional, they're far too common and it makes it hard to distinguish one song from another. There are, of course, some defining characteristics--for instance, the koto on "Oddweird" or the stereo synthesizero on "Oolong, Oolong"--but large sections of the songs could be otherwise be interchangeable. As a result, this is a good album to put on in the background, but I'm left wanting more in an instrumental album that I would be actively listening to. It's worth checking this disc out, but maybe I should also go check out their back catalog.
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