Kawaguchi Masami's New Rock Syndicate & Kryssi Battalene (C/Site Recordings)
From our own, Mr. Jim McHugh:
“Like Robert Fripp screwed-up on ‘Rainbow-Colors’ Purp roiling slow steep rapids on a viscus river of syrup, Kryssi’s utterly unique and inverted virtuosity, and the various units she edifies — mainly Headroom (slow beauty unfurling a la Rallizes-In-Dub, gliding over often menacing chasms on the owlish wings of her singing) and Mountain Movers (those precious-few notables of the 90’s ‘lyrics and chords, mainly serious’ lo-fi underground run through a shredder, heard from outside the shredder barely above its hum) —make her one of my five fave guitarists now active. It’s cool, then, to hear her in this extroverted context: a collab made on the fly in Japan, born of former LSD March-er Masami’s admiration of her approach and some giddy plans they forged when she materialized at a Tokyo solo gig of his.
As per usual, this enthused one-off from two crucial lifers makes for music far less conceptually fundamentalist than the outfits aforementioned; this lands like a more brightly-lit PSF session, focussing on various endemic styles of cool axe-based rock: prog, garage, drone, acid-folk — all pert with clarity.
A surprising emphasis on vocals runs a gantlet of classic songform created with a sound-palette clearly “retro-psych” in its provenance. This sunlit romp is rife with sitars, combo-organs, wah-wahs, ethereal “ooooooohs” and, of course, elongated sections of natural jam. The gnarled artistry of the players steers us clear of most roadworn cliches, paisley-stamped or kaftan-length, and, masterfully, no incense nor peppermints can be whatsoever detected.
Make no mistake, there are blasted moments akin to KM’s 90’s monsters (‘Pieces Of You’ — which, in chunks of cubesteak is what the ‘Pablo Picasso’ throbbing guitar duel aims leave on your floor) and tweaked slo-mo nods to KB’s more definitive work: both ‘Sunday Afternoon’ and ‘Shadow Of The Earth’ crawl toward their peaks, gleaming tho they are with bright folkish gossamer, not the disorienting goo obviously swallowing New Haven and everything else touched by Kryssi’s lovely trance-making Telecaster.”