Austin’s Best Band Comes to Brooklyn’s Best Venue This Saturday Night

Is Money Chicha’s album Echo en Mexico the heaviest cumbia ever made? Decide for yourself – it’s streaming at Soundcloud.  Just listen, for example, to the string-torturing axe-murderer guitar solo at the end of their version of Juaneco Y Su Combo’s classic, wordless elegy for a plane crash,  Lamento En La Selva, which opens the album. If psychedelic music, the magically trebly, trippy sounds of 1970s Peru, or the idea of dancing your ass off are your thing, get that ass down to Barbes this Saturday night, July 30 at 10 PM where this Austin band – a Grupo Fantasma spinoff – are headlining. A near-capacity crowd crammed into the place last night to see Locobeach – another spinoff of a famous band, in this case cumbia icons Chicha Libre – and they were playing mostly covers. So you’d better get there early.

What’s coolest about this band is how they cycle through just about every kind of psychedelic cumbia ever made: the brisk vamps of Juaneco’s cumbia selvetica; the allusive menace of Lima bands like Los Mirlos; the eclectic sparkle of Los Destellos and the outside-the-box surrealism of Chicha Libre, probably the band they ultimately resemble the most.

The album’s  second track, Level One Sound’s Quieren Efectos, has everything you could want from a classic cumbia jam: catchy minor-key tune, woozy wah guitar, a slinky groove, bright rat-tail organ riffs, trippy dub echoes and a suspenseful timbale beat that threatens to break completely loose but never does.

The title cut shuffles along briskly toward the graveyard, awash in reverb, haunted roller-rink organ and evil flangey guitar. The majestic, metallic guitar solo midway through reminds that the core of this band also play in Black Sabbath reinventors Brownout. Then they completely flip the script with the playful, cartoonish Animalitos: tiny elephants made from sweet crunchy dough = gourmet stoner munchies, no?

Cosa Verde, built around a simple, emphatic riff, looks back to the harder-rocking, classic Lima bands of the late 60s and early 70s like Los Diablo Rojos: the warpy tremoloing guitars really nail that era’s tinny studio sonics, beefed up with fat current-era low end and an unexpectedly dark bridge.

Cumbia Familiar is a very thinly disguised remake of a famous island tv theme first surfed out by the Ventures; this one has all kinds of spacy dub touches wafting through the mix. The album’s best track, Chicha Negra is also is darkest, simmering and swooshing with evil chromatics, serpentine organ and warptone guitar. Its mirror image is the Chicha Libre classic Papageno Electrico, a picture that completes itself when the organ joins the guitar duel at the end.

Yo No Soy Turku is a mashup of the blippy Mediterranean psychedelia of bands like Annabouboula and the macabre Turkish surf rock of Beninghove’s Hangmen. Likewise, the tricky, constantly shifting metrics and horror movie organ of 3 Balls continue the sinister tangent through a strange, dubby outro.

Cumbia Del Tamborcito is the album’s most dubwise and epic track, veering from a staggering intro, back and forth through gritty guitar-fueled intensity and lushly enveloping, nebulously smoky sonics. The final cut is La Cordillera, a deliciously doomy flamenco-metal song in cumbia disguise. Is the coolest album of the last several months or what?

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Innov Gnawa and Amadou & Mariam at the Peak of Their Psychedelic Powers at Prospect Park

“It’s hot all over,” guitarist/singer Amadou Bagayoko remarked to the Prospect Park Bandshell crowd last night in his heavy-lidded, Malian French drawl. On the hottest night of the year so far, one of the other things he noticed that was all over the place was weed. See, Amadou is blind. His other senses are working overtime.

But it hardly took a sensitive nose to pick up on what was wafting from the slope out back: this was a show for the smokers. And the place was packed: from personal experience and a survey of random concertgoers who’ve seen multiple show here recemtly, the only act who’s drawn as much of a crowd as Amadou & Mariam was Jamaican dancehall star Chronixx. Psychedelic music has never been so popular as it is in 2017.

Which is no surprise. Amadou & Mariam are arguably the world’s most individualistic psychedelic rock band. Over the years, they’ve inched further and further from their original mashup of sprawling two-chord Malian desert rock jams and bouncy central African pop, to a much more western sound rooted in the 1960s. And they’ve never sounded so interesting, or eclectic as they are now.

Mariam Doumbia – Amadou’s wife and childhood sweetheart – sang in her enigmatic, uneasily bronzed, sometimes gritty delivery in both French and Bambara, often harmonizing with Amadou’s balmy croon, going through a couple of costume changes in the process. Behind them, their drummer alternated between stomp, slink and funk while their bassist played tasteful, serpentine riffs and countermelodies, their keyboardist adding lushness and lustre on organ and several synth patches.

They opened with Bofou Safou, their driving, biting new single, sending a message that this show was going to rock pretty hard. From there they made their way methodically through a couple of leaping dance-funk numbers that brought to mind mid-80s Talking Heads, a starry nightscape with majestic Pink Floyd echoes, several similarly mighty blues-based anthems and a deliciously creepy detour into late 60s Laurel Canyon psychedelia.

It was on that allusively menacing number that Amadou took his longest, wildest, solo of the night. While his playing sometimes brings to mind the feral icepicking of Albert Collins, the twangy sparkle of Mark Knopfler and the machinegunning hammer-ons of Vieux Farka Toure, he doesn’t seem to be influenced by any of them, and with the exception of his countryman and younger colleague Toure, may not have even heard those guys. Winding up and down and around, he brought his long trails of sixteenth notes home to a final comet tail and wild applause. The band have a new album due out next month: if this concert is any indication, it’s going to be amazing.

Brooklyn’s own Innov Gnawa, whose career has taken a meteoric rise recently, opened and got a full hour onstage, a rarity at this venue. The sea of fans they’d brought to the show might explain why. Fresh off a Coachella appearance and a marathon series of New York club gigs, it’s hard to imagine a hotter band in town right now.

The only gnawa band in the world west of Morocco, they play the original drum-and-bass music. With roots in sub-Saharan, pre-Muslim central Africa, transplanted to the north, many of their hypnotic, pulsing, crackling themes date from over a thousand years ago. It’s party music, for sure, but it has even more cultural resonance for healing and spiritual purposes. With limited time (for them – this band can jam for hours) and a big stage to work with, they clanked and boomed and snapped their way through a dynamic mix of straight-ahead dance jams and trickier, turn-on-a-dime rhythms, winding up with frontman/sintir lute player Hassan Ben Jaafer running his basslines faster and faster as his chanting choir of bandmates whirled their cast-iron castnets, encircling him and bringing the show to a peak that would have been daunting to most headliners other than Amadou & Mariam.

Amadou & Mariam continue on US tour; their next show is on July 24 at 6:30 PM at Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park in Chicago; admission is free. Innov Gnawa are uptown at Ginny’s Supper Club on July 27, with sets at 7:30 and 9:30  PM; your best deal is standing room at the bar for $15.

The next show at Prospect Park Bandshell is tomorrow night, July 22 at 7:30 PM and opens auspiciously with Innov Gnawa percussionist Amino Belyamani’s similarly innovative, mesmerizingly rhythmic dancefloor minimalist trio, Dawn of Midi. Jury’s out on the headliner: are Mashrou ‘Leila the Lebanese Cure, or just another lame corporate dance-rock act?

A Long, Strange, Psychedelic New York Week, Part Two

In two parts – part one is here

After seeing Cameroonian singer Blick Bassy‘s unexpectedly psychedelic New York debut at Lincoln Center Thursday night, it was fun to wind up the evening at Barbes with a whole set by cinematic Venezuelan-American psychedelic instrumental trio Los Crema Paraiso. After taking their time loading their loop pedals, they played most of their newest album, De Pelicula to projections of segments from 1970s Venezuelan films: a road movie, a comedy and maybe a documentary or two.

When they do their all-instrumental version of Pink Floyd’s Shine on You Crazy Diamond, they usually play the whole monstrosity – this time the crowd got just the short version. Bittersweetly summery highway themes, frenetic volleys of tremolo-picking from guitarist José Luis Pardo, slinky and emphatic basslines from Bam Bam Rodriguez and the shapeshifting rhythms of drummer Neil Ochoa were mostly live, although both Pardo and Rodriguez’s pedals kicked in with some simple harmony lines or hazy textures from time to time, as their bouncy chamame rock themes unwound. At the end, they played their cover of Tears for Fears’ Everybody Wants to Rule the World, and finally, after having sufffered through that atrocity more than once before, it made sense – as theme music for a montage of banana republic dictators and their crimes. In this band’s hands, it became a horrible song about horrible people.

Saturday afternoon, it was even more annoying to miss almost all of psychedelic latin soul stars Chicano Batman’s set at Central Park Summerstage. The same thing happened with Roy Ayers’ set on Sunday  too. Both acts ended up going on an hour ahead of schedule, and a lot of people who showed up were disappointed. Five minutes of Bardo Martinez’s magic-carpet organ textures against Carlos Arévalo’s similarly kaleidoscopic guitar were tantalizing to the point of being painful.

And while it’s impossible to hate on Los Pericos – the Argentine ska-reggae crew has been around for thirty years and sound better now than their records from the 80s – it was also impossible to get out of sulk mode for them. Their tunes are catchy, their choruses go to more interesting places than most current roots reggae acts do, and just when it seemed they were about to get bogged down in a vampy, simplistic rut, they finally hit a grey-sky, Steel Pulse-ish minor-key groove. But all that was no substitute for the group originally schedued to headline this bill.

Back at home base Barbes on Saturday night, singer Chi-Chi Glass provided solace in the form of an unselfconsciously psychedelic solo set that she opened with a segment from an Albeniz piano suite. From there she built a synth-and-cajon suite of her own based on a Peruvian folk theme, sang a revolutionary folk tune in Quecha and finally encored with a haunting setting of a Maya Angelou poem, part noir cha-cha, part classical tone poem, part eerie art-rock.

A Long, Strange, Psychedelic New York Week

In two parts

It’s been a psychedelic week. Any week can be psychedelic if you’re in the right frame of mind, it’s just that this one had music to match the surrealism of the dream state that’s been a daily reality for Americans since the election. Over the past several days, the former’s made it a lot easier to get through the latter.

Blick Bassy’s latest album is spare and pensive, offering no hint of how trippy and magnetic his live show would be. Introducing the Cameroonian singer in his New York debut at Lincoln Center Thursday evening, impresario Jordana Phokompe was clearly stoked to have finally booked him here after seeing him play at Womex a couple of years ago. It was worth the wait.

Colorfully and loosely garbed, red goggle shades perched on his head (he never put them on), he was a much more forceful and magnetic presence than his rather gentle and austere recent work would indicate. And the performance was infinitely more psychedelic. That Bassy would sing in his native vernacular – one of more than 250 languages, many of them endangered, spoken in his country – added to the enigmatic ambience. Yet emotional content, at least at opposite ends of the emotional spectrum, were distinct, especially in a wrenching lament, and the long mini-suite of love songs that ended the show, his cat-ate-the-canary croon a dead giveaway.

For most of the set, he played banjo, fingerpicking it judiciously rather than frailing the strings bluegrass-style. Toward the end, he picked up what looked like a child’s model Telecaster  and fingerpicked intricate, rippling, kora-like upper-register phrases in a spiny, open tuning

That his trio would have such unorthodox instrumentation, let alone that trombonist Johan Blanc and cellist Clément Petit would put on such a wall-bending display of extended technique, raised the surrealism factor several notches. Blanc was in charge of atmospherics with his low, looming phrases, often playing through a loop pedal or switching to a mini-keyboard and mixer. At one point, he ran Bassy’s vocals through the keyboard and built a harmony line with them as he sang. Of course, Blanc could simply have sung that harmony part himself, but the strange effect would have been lost

Petit is Bassy’s not-so-secret weapon. There were a few places where he held down somber, ambered sustained notes, or threw off a jaunty glissando or two, but mostly he plucked out basslines. As intricate as they grew, Petit never got too busy, often fattening the sound via an octave pedal which sent his cello down low into a rabbit hole where cellos usually can’t go. And he didn’t limit his lines to blues or rock. Like the bandleader, he spiraled through some kora-like phrases, and for a second even evoked the otherworldly bounce of Moroccan gnawa trance music.

Bassy is a diehard fan of plaintive, intense American blues iconoclast Skip James, so it was no surprise that the highlight of the show turned out to be after some amusing stage shtick, where Bassy looped a couple of bars from an old James record and then played variations that took the song straight back to its African roots.

The next show at the atrium space at Lincoln Center is this Thursday, July 20 at 7:30 PM with a relevance much closer to home: Brooklyn-based, Gil Scott-Heron influenced Brooklyn hip-hop duo Quincy Vidal. The show is free, so getting to the space on time is crucial. 

After the Blick Bassy show, it was great fun to catch a whole set by cinematic psychedelic trio Los Crema Paraiso across the river. You can find out what happened in part two, here. 

Chicano Batman, the Hottest Thing in Latin and Psychedelic Soul, Hit Central Park This Weekend

Chicano Batman are the hottest thing in psychedelic soul right now – or maybe in all of soul music, for that matter. Over the course of their eclectic career, they’ve done everything from noir psychedelia to  LA lowrider grooves as well as  more tropical sounds. Their latest album Freedom Is Free – streaming at Bandcamp – is their most traditionally 60s soul-oriented, yet with the psychedelic touches they’re best known for. They’re the highlight of a triplebill this Satutday,  July 15 at around 5 PM at Central Park Summerstage. A generically dancey band open the afternoon at 3ish; popular 80s Argentine janglerockers Los Pericos headline atfterward if you feel like sticking around for your nostalgia fix .Get there on time if you’re going

The album opens with Passed You By, a gorgeous oldschool soul ballad  that sounds like the Zombies covering the Stylistics, with Binky Griptite in elegant mode on lead guitar. The reverb on frontman Bardo Martinez’s organ, backing vocals and echoey guitar fragments add subtle psychedelic touches to the point where the whole is a lot bigger than the sum of its parts – this band is very good at doing that.

Martinez  turns up his organ’s roto all the way over drummer Gabriel Villa’s scrambling shuffle groove, like the Soul Brothers with hints of James Brown, in Friendship (Is a Small Boat in a Storm). Angel Child is a real trip: strutting bass, woozy wah guitar, lysergically pulsing Sergeant Pepper textures and a little in-the-pocket James Brown all mashed up together.

Bassist Eduardo Arenas’ snappy drive fuels the album’s sunny title track, while guitarist Carlos Arévalo shows off his elegant Hendrixian chosp on the spiky, psychedleic intro to the understatedly plaintive, Os Mutantes-tinged La Jura, a feast of vintage organ and vintage analog synth textures. All the trick endings raise the surrealism level several notches.

The band balances rapidfire precision – check out Arévalo’s wry wah-wah guitar solo – with a lingering red-sunset atmosphere in Flecha Al Sol. Jealousy is not the creepy Ninth House dirge but an artfully assembled, crescendoing  original – is that a weird low-register synth patch, or Arenas’ bass running through a fuzztone pedal? It’s anybody’s guess.

The band follows the delicious jangles and ripples of the bouncy latin funk intro Right Off the Back with Run, a swaying, shapeshifting mini-epic sparkling with blippy organ, flitting congas, mosquito guitar, soaringly orchestrated choruses featuring New York’s own all-female Mariachi Flor de Toloache and a couple of unexpectedly balmy organ interludes.

The album’s longest and best track, The Taker Story, is an anti-imperialist broadside, part Isaac Hayes hot butter, part Gil Scott-Heron, with a hazy latin tint. Over a leaping, trickily polyrhythmic groove, Martinez traces many thousand years of colonization and relentless exploitation. “You can’t believe that native people are still around,” Martinez intones with withering sarcasm. The album winds up with the uneasily rippling psych-folk theme Area C. This is going to be the summer jam for an awful lot of people in 2017.

An Improbable, Magic Comeback Album From Psychedelic Cumbia Legends Los Wembler’s

The best short album of 2017 is by a band from the 1960s who until now have never released a record outside Peru. Los Wembler’s de Iquitos play chicha, the surfy, reverb-drenched psychedelic cumbias that were all the rage from Lima to the Amazon from the late 60s til the early 80s, and thanks to Chicha Libre have become arguably the world’s default party music. But unlike so many of their more urban colleagues, Los Wembler’s (the apostrophe is probably just bad English) never got soft with synthesizers or drum machines. Their new ep Ikaro Del Amor – streaming at Spotify  – captures the band pretty much as feral and surreal as they were almost fifty years ago, except with good production values. And producer/Chicha Lilbre bandleader Olivier Conan gives the band a chance to tune their guitars, something they didn’t get to do when recording their big Amazonian hit La Danza Del Petrolero, which first reached a global audience via the first of Barbes’ Records’ two indispensable Roots of Chicha compilations.

The only band member who didn’t live to see this is family patriarch and bounder Salomon Sanchez Casanova. Otherwise, this is most of the original members, on guitars, bass and multi-percussion. The opening title track, a chicha standard, comes across as a bizarrely catchy mashup of ska rhythm, tropical mosquito guitar, Ventures surf twang and a little C&W. There’s a mysterious shout-out to Brooklyn in there too.

The centerpiece is a sprawling, phantasmagorical take of Sonido Amazonico, later simplified into a one-chord jam (and a big hit) by Lima band Los Mirlos, then recorded almost forty years later by Chicha Libre as the title track to their first album. Over time, the song has become as iconic as Pipeline is to surf rock fans, or Anarchy in the UK is to punks. Awash in resonant jangle, wah-wah riffs and endless permutations on an ominous chromatic melody, it’s the creepiest, slinkiest, trippiest jam of the year.

There are two other tracks. The epic La Mentecata has a wryly expanding, Twelve Days of Xmas style series of verses, a bubbly, almost Cuban guitar hook and a steady clave on the woodblock. The final cut is Dos Amores, lead guitarist Alberto Sanchez Casanova airing out every sound in his effects boxes, from a fair approximation of an electric accordion to the kind of low-budget electric piano one might have found in a ramshackle recording studio in the band’s halcyon days.

That this album exists at all boggles the mind; until being rediscovered in the early part of this decade the band would regroup for the occasional block party, but that’s about it. And now they’re wrapping up their first European tour. Big up to Conan and Barbes Records for having the foresight to bring them to the mass audience they deserve.

Gold Dime Release Their Dark, Haphazardly Trippy New Album at Alphaville Tonight

Gold Dime’s new album Nerves – streaming at Bandcamp –  personifies the best side of indie rock coming out of Brooklyn these days. Nothing effete or twee or mannered about their careening, noisy assault. Frontwoman/multi-instrumentalist Andrya Ambro (half of messy, well-known avant rock duo Talk Normal) doesn’t have Siouxsie Sioux’s command of microtones, or menace for that matter, but she still could pass for a Banshee, in the early days of that band, at least. Gold Dime are playing the album release show for their new one at Alphaville tonight, June 3 at around 11. Explosive postrock/spacerock guitar loopscaper Ben Greenberg, AKA Hubble opens the show at 10; cover is $10.  Then on June 16 Gold Dime are at C’Mon Everybody at 9 for the same price..

The new album’s opening epic, Easy is a galloping, noisy raga-rock jam,, bouncy bass holding it together hypnotically as guitarist Lazar Bozic’s spacerock chords devolve into shards of feedback and reverb-tank pings – and then they pull the monster back on the rails. The mantra “You can’t tell me nothing” becomes a simple, emphatic “Leave me alone,” as Parior Walls‘ Kate Mohanty’s alto sax enters the mix, whirling and then sputtering.

The amped-up version of spoken word artist Anne Clark’s All We Have to Be Thankful For growls along with echoes of Syd Barrett, vintage Jesus & Mary Chain and Teenage Jesus & the Jerks, Ambro’s sarcastically deadpan vocal over wry faux-doo-wop and sheets of spacerock reverb guitar.

The minimalistic 4 Hours sounds more like the Creatures than Siouxsie, with spare alto sax over a simple, pounding drum riff until the guitars ooze and then march in. “You don’t own me, a lot of you don’t know me…but you cut me,” Ambro intones as the firestorm rises behind her.

Shut Up sounds like an Unknown Pleasures-era Joy Division outtake with a woman out front, spiced with vintage drum machine and light industrial percussion. Ambro opens Quota  – as in “I’m not here to fill your quota” – over a trancey digeridoo loop; the reverie punctured by eerie  guitar riffage that brings to mind Randi Russo. Disinterested begins with even more menacing reverb guitar clang and roar, then follows an allusive All Tomorrow’s Parties-ish tangent, violinist Adam Markiewicz’s sweepingly multitracked string arrangement alternating with fret-melting crush. 

With its simple, plaintive, rainy-day piano, Hindsight starts as a less devastated take on Joy Division’s The Eternal, then the sky darkens as the guitars blot out what’s left of the sun. The album winds up with Rock, which pretty much capsulizes everything this band is about: minimalistically vamping industrial new wave spacerock psychedelia. Who wouldn’t want to see a band do all that live?

A Colossally Heavy Triplebill at Drom This Past Evening

“Dead Wake. Their first gig? Fooled me!” Imminent Sonic Destruction frontman Tony Piccoli wasn’t alone in thinking that. A lot of great bands have made memorable debuts at Drom over the years, but very few rock acts as heavy as Dead Wake. From how acrobatically and expertly they made their way through brain-warping metric changes and stylistic shifts, it’s obvious that all of these guys have had plenty of experience. Still, you never expect a band to come out of the chute firing on as many cylinders as these guys did. and with a combination of as much finesse and relentless assault. They could have headlined this killer night of cutting-edge metal that also featured Pennsylvania’s Next to None along with ISD.

One aspect that sets Dead Wake apart is how they vary the vocals. Frontman Sam Smith does the pigsnorting guttural deathmetal thing, while six-string bassist  Rob Zahn supplies the Dickinsonian grand guignol. His big, boomy, toxic clouds of chords anchored many of the songs, but it was his elegant Rime of the Ancient Mariner of a solo that was one of the set’s high points. Guitarist Lance Barnewold – stage right, wearing a Metallica shirt – fired off one sizzling volley of tapping after another, while his counterpart across the way, Steven Drizis, had more of a resonant solar flare attack. Drummer Marc Capellupo made the constant tempo shifts look easy: you can hear echoes that go all the way back to Queensryche and Pantera in their music, but their mashup of thrash, doom and orchestral grandeur is unlike any other band out there.

Next to None were even more stylistically diverse, and just as individualistic. Frontman/keyboardist Thomas Cuce proved equally capable as bovine bellower and operatic apocalypse messenger. It was his creepy, Messiaenic organ interlude that turned out to be the band’s high point on stage, although guitarist Derrick Schneider’s valkyrie savagery and biting sarcasm gave the music a lot more color than most thrash bands can deliver. They also had the night’s heaviest rhythm section, as you would expect from a bassist who’s a Slipknot fan.

Barely half an hour into Imminent Sonic Destruction’s set, Piccoli glanced up from his guitar to the sound booth. He’d been given the signal – by his own sound guy, no less. – that the band had one song left.

That song turned out to be twenty minutes long, part pastoral Zep, part Peter Gabriel-era Genesis on steroids, part merciless stomp. Guitarist Scott Thompson channeled grimly spare rainy-day Jimmy Page while Piccoli’s lightning runs looked back to the James Hetfield playbook. Earlier in the set, Piccoli had sent electric chair shivers down everybody’s spines with his slides down the fretboard, along with an ice storm of tremolo-picking that would have made Dick Dale jealous. Bassist Bryan Paxton held down the stygian low end and matched that with the occasional zombie-bogman growl, while drummer Pat Deleon made all the epic twists and turns look easy. Keyboardist Pete Hopersberger sang the quieter passages, spinning classical piano flourishes, psychedelic organ and ominous clouds of synth.

They opened with the doomy calculus of I Am the Fall, then made Breaking Through, another twenty-minute monstrosity,, equal parts symphonic grandeur and knee-to-the-face thud. Outside of Golden Fest or this past January’s multi-band extravaganzas at this club, it’s hard to think of a triplebill this year as relentlessly interesting as this one.

Heavy Psych Trio River Cult Make a Twisted Live EP

Heavy psychedelic trio River Cult spun off of an excellent, similarly loud and underrated Brooklyn postrock band, Eidetic Seeing. Their debut ep got the thumbs up here; their latest one, Live at WFMU is up as a name-your-price download at Bandcamp. More bands should be making live albums – if you’re paying for studio time, it’s infinitely cheaper, and you can capture what the band really sounds like. Do it right and it’s the best advertising you could have. They’re bringing their cinematic, unhinged, doomy sounds to the Cobra Club in Bushwick on May 27 at 11 PM; cover is $10.

They open the album’s first number, Likelihood of Confusion with a syncopated sway and then straighten it out, drummer Tav Palumbo’s nimble flurries under guitarist/frontman Sean Forlenza’s sunbaked blues riffage in tandem with bassist Anthony Mendolia. “Sobriety! In the breeze,” Forlenza sneers. “I can’t get by…it just gets boring.” But this doesn’t, through a Stoogoid wah solo, a bit of finger, then an echoing pulsar interlude that Palumbo eventually crashes the band out of.

They segue out of that epic into the even longer, practically ten-minute Temps Perdu, stomping their way through what could be the early Dream Syndicate playing Sir Lord Baltimore. Mendolia goes up the scale as Forlenza holds his notes, bends the walls, shivers and then descends toward a mournful abyss as the rhythm slows and then falls away.

The longest, most twistedly picturesque and final cut is Shadow Out of Time. Forlenza plays echoey slide over a dirgy sway, then all of a sudden they pick up steam and they’re into Daydream Nation-era Sonic Youth with offcenter bass/guitar harmonies. And then into galloping post-Sabbath: “It gets hard to breathe when you know you just wanna be dead,” Forlenza snarls. The studio version collapses into its own grave; the slow lights-on-lights-off outro here is even better and just as creepy. On the floor, headphones on, you know the drill. Is that just ash or is there something in there?

Vast, Inviting, Hypnotic Indian Raga Soundscapes and a Brooklyn Show by Arranged Marriage NP

Arranged Marriage NP play a distinctive, hypnotic, psychedelic mashup of classical Indian raga music and Eno-esque soundscapes with flickers of industrial noise and Frippertronics-style textures. Guitarist/keyboardist Jerry Adler got his start as the singer in indie rockers the Blam, released a couple of fiery lyrical acoustic folk-rock albums as Flugente and then turned to dreampop with Wave Sleep Wave. Here, he teams with Indian classical duo the Biryani Boys’ sitarist Mustafa Bhagat for a quartet of long instrumentals. The duo’s debut album is streaming at Bandcamp; they’re playing the album release show at 8:30 PM on May 10 at Art Cafe, 884 Pacific St.(at Washington Ave) in Fort Greene as part of Brooklyn Raga Massive’s weekly series there. Cover is $15; the closest train is the 2 to Bergen St.,

Over just under eleven minutes, Bhagat’s sitar on the opening number, Hemant gives Adler a terse, spacious backdrop to play against. With a wash of synth in the background, the guitarist’s deep-space resonance moves to the center, then backs away for a similarly celestial sitar solo. Then Adler brings some trippy backward masking as well as a gritty industrial crunch into what’s an otherwise starry, peaceful picture.

The similarly expansive Bhimpalasi juxtaposes a plaintive alap (improvisation) from the sitar over droll bubbles and industrial textures from Adler: a rugged individualist against a stubborn, antagonistic universe, maybe? The third track, Hamsadhwani builds almost imperceptibly from a warmly expansive, inviting sitar intro that Adler slowly paints a quasar galaxy over with his echoey guitar and terse yet vast washes of keys, a simple, emphatic four-note riff repeating for maximum hypnotic effect.

The final track, Malkauns, is also the album’s shortest, clocking in at just over nine minutes worth of the album’s most uneasy themes. Adler chooses his spots, playing with a slide or adding enigmatically clanging phrases; as the echo grows, it becomes harder and harder to tell who in the duo is playing what, testament to the kind of chemistry they conjure. Toward the end, Adler snarls and crunches into aggressive Marc Ribot skronk, a logical conclusion that delivers a big payoff considering that it took almost forty minutes of womb-like comfort to get there.