Album Reviews

Flashing Open LP/
Splendor Mystic Solis
Heavy Acid Blowout Tensions
(eclipse)
There’s little that’s as thrilling as finding an artist whose own aesthetic universe is perfectly conceptualised. Steve Krakow is one such artist: his Galactic Zoo Dossier magazine is a classic personal record of psych-rock obsession, and Krakow’s artwork is seriously untamed, combining ‘60s psycehdelic poster art, the trash aesthetics of the schlock-horror art seen on the Cramps and Crypt records sleeves and caricatures as hilariously rendered as John Crawford’s Baboon Dooley strip in Forced Exposure. He’s also just started releasing music through the Galactic Zoo Disk imprint, and is currently making noise in the Plastic Crimewave outfit. Krakow’s also adopted Plastic Crimewave as pseudonym, and on Flashing Open, he sets out his musical parameters quite clearly. While the motorbike distortion levels of the gnarlier tracks on the album will have people flashing back on the flesh-searing impact of first hearing High Rise or Mainliner, there’s something about Krakow’s guitar playing note-displacement theories and the unbridled stoopid weight of their songs that reminds me of classic 1980’s Australian underground rock from the likes of Feedtime or Bloodloss. And if some of the cuts documented on Flashing Open noodle a little too much, particularly evoked by some thin and delay-soaked guitar lines that are almost gothic in their construct, when the outfit hits on a riff or a groove, they grind it joyously into the ground with all the primitive oomph of school-kids crushing sand-pit mountains under their feet.
Krakow has also comped as a tour organizer for Japanese heavy-rock concept creator Asahito Nanjo, bringing Mainliner and Toho Sara to America in 1999. Krakow was strong-armed into the fleetingly conceptualized Splendor Mystic Solis for the purposes of the tour, along with Shimura Koji (Mainliner, White Heaven), Sasaki Hisashi (Ruins) and Kawabata Makato (Acid Mothers Temple, Mainliner, Musica Transonic). There’s an impressive empathy charging through the air on the three live recordings documented on Heavy Acid Blowout Tensions (Live), although it’s also fair to say that the psyche-rock avenue the outfit were railroading down wasn’t exactly a huge challenge to fit to one’s playing style. The three-pronged attack of the guitar flank (Nanjo, Krakow, Kawabata on monstrously good form) makes for some densely threshing and intertwining string-web, and the trio’s general model is well-formulated. As an added bonus, Krakow puts pen to paper and charts the ridiculous highs and lows of the tour, skirting not-so-diplomatically around the peculiarities of Nanjo’s relationship to the known world.

-Jon Dale (Signal to Noise #32) Dec. 04