Daily Loaf

This year, the Japanese psychedelic-metal collective Acid Mothers Temple stayed busier than most and released four albums.

Their latest, Dark Side of the Black Moon: What Planet Are We On? is unaltered in the slightest from their innumerable previous outputs, and if anything, their style – a distinct rupture of metallic speed – has swelled into an even more berserk tempest.

No other band makes music so extreme; not extreme like a Mountain Dew commercial, but more comparable to the overzealous pursuit of distilling only what is required to showcase a lack of moderation.

There are no interludes, no breakdowns, no calm patches, no introspection, and not an iota of breathing room, because once Dark Side awakens, every instant fires full throttle, with a demented treatment of overlapping guitars charging imponderable beats-per-minute, the swarm of fizzy intergalactic effervescence, and the unequivocal jangle of tribal psychedelia heard in pastoral Bavarian communes during the late ’60s. Read the rest of this entry »

All photos by Tracy May.

Beneath the white Christmas lights dangling from the canopy in the half-filled venue, the hum of anticipation was upset, ruptured by the audience crowding against the stage, hopping and whooping and hugging, the applause thundering as Sergio Dias, age 57, dressed in the immaculate white robe a cleanshaven cult leader would wear, stepped onto the stage at Skipper’s Smokehouse this past Tuesday, October 13, backed by a group of musicians decades younger.

Anyone expecting the Os Mutantes show — the Brazilian band’s first ever in Tampa and in support of their first album in 35 years — to be like the Mike Love Beach Boys Experience, some bastardized Charlie Watts Presents The Rolling Stones, or even the current edition of Lynyrd Skynyrd at your neighborhood strawberry festival, was absolutely mistaken. Read the rest of this entry »

“Tampa misses so much cool shit,” my friend Brian Repetto of Insect Joy turns to me and whispers through a cigarette smoke exhale. New World Brewery, Thursday, August 6. One of those nights in Y-bore that turn out really fun because you conned a few friends to hang out and support local music.

“Oh well, I’m glad I made it out, man. This is a really great lineup tonight.” No joke. Insect Joy interestingly spliced record dj-ing and spinning with their usual weird electronic sounds whirling into the atmosphere. Flexxehawk blasted through their spidery, angular, intricate yet minimalist songs with true enthusiasm and purity reserved for bands willing to play their damnist whether the crowd consists of five people or 500.

Huge musical buildups and crescendos with very few but very meaningful words flesh out the Flexxehawk sound into something original, in the vein of Polvo’s kind of math rock mixed with textured vocal harmonies. Historically members and contributors of several local and national acts including Ima, Dumbwaiters, Meringue, etc. All this not even mentioning the touring headliner, ST37.

Out of this world, psychedelic, noisy, punk and weird, references to J.G. Ballard and Twin Peaks, all in one four-piece from Austin …

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Pennsylvania experimental rock ensemble Black Moth Super Rainbow (pictured, photo by Jae Rumberto) hit retro and modern notes all at once with their day-glo vibrant electro-dance melodies, fizzadelic folk shambles and made-for-space jams. It’s some of the headiest music you’ll find out there right now, but songwriter/frontman/creative conscience Tobacco (real name Tom Fec) doesn’t consider his music psychedelic at all.

“I think everything I do is pop,” he told me a few weeks ago during a phone interview before the second leg of the band’s two-part tour. “I don’t like psychedelic music and I never set out to do it. It just sort of comes out that way. I might be the only person who thinks this, but Eating Us … it seems like a pop album to me.”

Eating Us, his band’s fourth and latest full-length, is not the sort of name that makes me think pop. The black-and-white album cover, with its smeary sad face superimposed onto the back of a hand, doesn’t make me think of pop music, either. And the limited edition “hairy” version of Eating Us (with synthetic hair in its inner sleeve) is probably as far from pop packaging as you can feasibly get. (FOR VIDEOS and MORE, CLICK HERE)