ROVO lay down incremental evolutions on the same sound, album after album, consistently for over a decade now. With most bands, this would be a bad thing. Fortunately, this particular sound is a jaw dropping transcendent bliss hurricane, perpetually bestowing its myriad gifts upon the listener, play after play. Their latest full length proves the rule again.
Basically, take the spaced out sun worshipping tribal krautrock jams of latter day Boredoms, divide it by Miles Davis‘ brilliant, hard rocking Pangaea-era band, multiply the result with judicious electronic manipulation and add exquisite electric violin fireworks. Now you’ve got a tiny kernel of an idea about how this sounds.
Already a favorite here at Optimistic Underground (see Pyramid and Mon posts), I won’t mince words reiterating how I feel about the band itself. Instead, I’ll break down what makes this album particularly eargasmic. For starters, the band seems to have discovered a more laconic sense of beauty and space; these five tracks radiate a confident, nearly relaxed sense of purpose and design. No longer boiling directly into frenzied storms to get the point across, they craft this piece with a jeweler’s touch using gentler elements like hushed marimbas in album centerpiece Melodia, allowing the dueling percussionists to convey a soft-spoken interplay in leiu of the usual kung fu assault. Of course, this wouldn’t be ROVO without those warp-speed eruptions, the moments when everything locks into place, time and space folding into some utopian extradimensional conveyance – these are simply delivered with a measure of of grace and patience befitting an outfit knocking out their eight consecutive masterpiece.
The thing with this music is, you simply have to hear it to believe it, much less know exactly what it’s like. No amount of superlative descriptors in the world can prepare you for the absolutely addictive nature contained within. Nothing can truly describe the hypnotic fever-dream euphoria. Just listen, and get familiar. You can thank me later.
And seriously, watch this psychedelic preview / live footage hybrid.
[get your hands on this god-level magnificence at hmv japan or yesasia.com]
Optimistic Underground 