Crystal Antlers – Tentacles

Crystal Antlers - Tentacles

Long Beach’s experimental indie wunderkinds here unleash upon us 13 sonic postcards from the nether side of Planet California. Either too much sun or not enough has clearly wreaked havoc on the poor boys but whatever they’ve lost is the music lovers’ gain as they come on like Of Montreal after a major Hammond organ ingestion at the dinner table with The Flaming Lips.

Not letting up for a second in the pursuit of hammered eardrums, there’s a brief respite in the early part of ‘Until The Sun Dies (Part One)’ - which manages to seem a lot longer than its two minutes 50 length - before Jonny Bell is once more howling his way through another tortured sounding composition. That’s not to say though that this is by any means a harrowing experience as albums go, far from it. There is an underlying joy and even humour to every song here (look no further than the mad trumpet backing on ‘Your Spears’) – they clearly enjoyed every minute of recording this.

Things calm down by their standard on the penultimate track, ‘Swollen Sky’, which leads on to the album’s epic, the seven minute ‘Several Tongues’. Entering into the territory commonly known as “jazz freakout” this monster builds continuously to a glorious riot of screeches, hammond and drums until sanity is regained and it cycles down to a nice organ fade out.

Currently the band appear to have only three UK live shows upcoming, in March, but if there’s any justice in the world more will be added or they’ll rectify things in the summer – they deserve to be massive for as long as they can manage it.

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