Japanese freak rock heroes Acid Mothers Temple—with their offshoot groups and collaborations and what not—have been winning hearts and minds and blowing the latter since 1996 with their dozens of psychedelic and space rock albums, and one thing is undeniable: they have a playful sense of humor, as you can tell by their positive genius for coming up with amusing album titles that evoke classical rock albums of the past. Or maybe they don’t think they’re funny at all. I do.
There are far, far too many to mention, but my favorites include 2001’s Absolutely Freak Out (Zap Your Mind!), that same year’s Electric Heavyland, 2002’s St. Captain Freak Out & the Magic Bamboo Request, 2004’s Minstrel in the Galaxy, 2009’s Are We Experimental, that same year’s Dark Side of the Black Moon: What Planet Are We On?, 2011’s The Ripper at the Heaven’s Gates of Dark and THAT same year’s Son of a Bitches Brew, 2012’s Chaos Unforgiven Kisses or Grateful Dead Kennedys, 2013’s Doobie Wonderland, 2024’s Trust Masked Replicants, and my personal fave, 2006’s Starless and Bible Black Sabbath.
I’m not going to run down all of Acid Mothers Temple name variations and offshoot bands—suffice it to say they’ve mostly recorded under the names Acid Mothers Temple & the Melting Paraiso U.F.O. and Acid Mothers Temple & The Cosmic Inferno, although if you’re lazy like me you’ll just call them Acid Mothers Temple and be done with it. Stylistically, they’ve covered entire continents worth of territory—the playful Doobie Wonderland is a far cry from the spacy jazz rock of Son of a Bitches Brew or the ferocious metal bong-grind of Starless and Bible Black Sabbath.
Despite those album titles, group founder Kawabata Makoto doesn’t cite classic rock—although he concedes he got his LOOK from Ritchie Blackmore—as a primary influence on Acid Mothers Temple’s music. He’s more likely to cite Krautrock, progressive rock, and Karlheinz Stockhausen. But things he’s said over the years make it clear his music comes from a more cosmic place.
“When I play any sort of instrument, not just guitar,” he told one interviewer, “I never think that it’s me making the music or of music as a means of self expression. In my head, I constantly hear sounds from the cosmos (or God, or whatever you want to call it). I believe that these sounds are constantly there, all around us. I’m just like the receiver in a radio, picking up these sounds, and then transforming them with my hands into a form that everyone can hear. So I’m constantly striving to become a better receiver—picking up sounds from ever higher dimensions, picking them up ever more precisely, and then reproducing them ever more exactly. That’s my aim.”
As you’d expect of someone of such cosmic bent, and a fella who’s played with the titles of more than one Pink Floyd album, Makoto has described the Acid Mothers Temple concept as “in two words… trip music.” Or to be more precise, “really extreme trip music.” That said, Makoto isn’t particularly impressed by the acid rock genre. “I have listened to all sorts of trippy psychedelic records,” he told one interviewer, “but I was never fully satisfied with them.” A man of exalted standards, our Kawabata, and hardly lacking in ego.
It would be a mistake to think that the music on those albums with their playful titles always has anything to do with the bands you associate them with—Doobie Wonderland has zero Doobie Brothers in it. Acid Mothers Temple does not—as much as I wish they would—break into “Black Water” or perform cosmic plastic surgery on “Listen to the Music.” I hear a smidgeon of Frank Zappa in Absolutely Freak Out (Zap Your Mind!), but miles of Miles in Son of a Bitches Brew. In short, it’s a crap shoot people.
On Starless and Bible Black Sabbath, you get exactly what you’d expect to get, at least when it comes to Ozzy and Company. It’s an homage of sorts to their creepy-crawly doom metal, more free-form perhaps but still heavy-as-fuck. That said, Makoto would disagree with that “free-form”: he once described AMT’s playing as “basically improvised,” before adding, “but… we were always trying to create some sort of song structure so what we were doing was completely different to so-called free music.” And you can hear some of the heavier elements of Starless and Bible Black in there as well, although I admit I’m probably missing some of them because I avoid King Crimson the way most people avoid punji pits.
As for Makoto’s rejection of the “free form” label he’s dead correct—there are structures to the one very long song and the other shorter number that make up Starless and Bible Black Sabbath. They’re not jam sessions or the kind of free-form freakouts you’ll hear, for example, on albums by Japanese cult legends Les Rallizes Dénudés or the more amateurish and primal music produced by the percusssion-happy musical wing of the Munich-based radical political art commune Amon Düül (later of course, to spawn Amon Düül II).
But back to Black Sabbath and King Crimson. The album cover is eerily similar to the cover of Black Sabbath’s eponymous debut, and the LP’s title track (which the band breaks into two parts) is just as obviously a nod to the funereal title track of Black Sabbath. Again, call it homage (if it’s a joke, there’s obviously a lot of affection in it), but if you’re a Black Sabbath fan, you’re bound to love it.
“Starless and Bible Black Sabbath, Pt. 1″ opens in much the same way Sabb’s “Black Sabbath” does—with ominous sound. Fairies in boots walk down a hall, followed by some shuffling and feedback before the song grinds into motion with some for-whom-the-bell-tolls-portentous heavy metal riffage, bone-breaking two-drummer pound pound, lots of spacy synth squiggles and bird noises gratis Higashi Hiroshi, and bassist Tabata Mitsuru’s (later of Boredoms) graveyard shoveling. Over which Mitsuru plays unhinged guitar, all menacing feedback and pyromania. Until the rhythm section abandons the Bataan Death March beat, gets kinda free jazzy and Makoto just… shreds while Mitsuru jumps in and out on echoing vocals. It’s a tour de force and metal at its most ominous, stoner iron for people who also go in for a bit of aberrant swing.
The LP splits the title track between sides, so hurry up and flip the mother or you’re back in the days of the 8-track when you’d be in the middle of your favorite song and it would stop dead and you’d hear this click and then the song would (after a delay of forever) start again, harshing your vibe and fucking up your listening experience real good. That is if the 8-track player didn’t decide to go Cookie Monster on you and eat the 8-track for a snack.
Except it will do you no good to hurry up and flip the album because the A-side isn’t over; instead of going into Pt. 2 the band goes into “Woman From a Hell,” a six (exactly) minute Formula 1 racer and free-for-all on which Makoto and Hiroshi cut loose completely over some righteous four-fisted drum clamor while Hiroshi throws lots of indecipherable but melodic vocals on top. It doesn’t falter from beginning to end, and while it’s noisy as a foundry it isn’t formless. Makes me think of Deep Purple playing at triple time because they’re being pursued by starving hyenas.
“Starless and Bible Black, Pt. 2″ opens with some guitar feedback, then returns us to the mucho ominoso cemetery crawl that opened part one; take away the synth squiggles and you have Black Sabbath in full black mass mode. Hiroshi’s back behind the microphone singing about (I’m just guessing here—I can’t make out a word) how he’s been buried alive by feedback and the reason you can’t understand him is because he has guitar dirt in his mouth. You can do the Iron Man stomp to this baby, hell Godzilla would find it the perfect soundtrack for tap-tapping over dance floor Tokyo. Then Makoto proceeds to play psychedelic monster guitar, things come to a stop in some guitar squeal and show-offy six-string pyrotechnics, and you might think that’s the end but we’re only at the halfway point!
But we start over at the beginning, back in black (sabbath) so to speak, except Makoto is still going full bore, a fucking guitar god, and if this is the sound he hears in his head he’s receiving radio transmissions from one metalhead of a deity indeed. On and on he goes, the synth coming in and out but the drums and bass never letting up. Is this the greatest heavy metal dirge I’ve ever laid ears on? Yes. It’s the sound of that rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem, if ever I’ve heard it, waiting to be born. Then the drums drop out, Makoto drops out, and you get some acoustic guitars a-strumming and Hiroshi singing or ululating maybe—suffice it to say if those are real words crawling out of his mouth my name is Hiroo Onoda and I’ve just emerged from the jungle, 80 years after the end of World War II. (Actually he surrounded in 1971; just in time—lucky him—for the release of E Pluribus Funk!)
Starless and Bible Black Sabbath is one Pearl Harbor of an album. And the most wondrous thing about Acid Mothers Temple is it isn’t representative of their body of work for the simple reason that no single album is representative of their body of work. They remind me a lot of Arizona’s Sun City Girls in this respect. Acid Mothers Temple have spent decades playing musical chairs and they’ve rarely (if ever) ended up in the same chair twice.
Which makes their massive body of work endlessly interesting, and leaves you with the moral and ethical obligation to listen to them all, which will be time consuming for sure but will enrich your life while also making you the coolest person in your circle of friends and perhaps even a 1,000-mile radius of where you’re currently sitting. And you want to be that person, right?
I recommend you start with this one, then move on to Doobie Wonderland, then move on to Electric Heavyland, then move on to Grateful Head/Whopping Wild Freaks, then…
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
