(This record review originally appeared in the SF Weekly.)
Authentic hippie jams, like those whipped up by the Massachusetts collective Sunburned Hand of the Man, operate like ritual magick. Their practitioners must exercise discipline and self-induced gullibility. If you attempt to invoke the Egyptian deity Horus, then you better believe he’s real and perform the incantation with detailed precision. These are the essential qualities that remove SHOTM’s polyrhythmic epics from the permanently stoned drum circles on hippie hill. Only serious students of psychedelia carefully craft freely flowing pointillist fretwork recalling Garcia’s bluegrass picking and Creem-of-Clapton garage fuzz. Only true citizens of the universe then weave these strings through rhythms distilled from field recordings of ancient African and Middle Eastern cultures, as well as the Allman Brothers’ Live at the Fillmore East. And like James Brown, vocalist John Maloney’s litany of echo-drenched sobs and moans is both free spirit (Horus?) and the sergeant’s bark coordinating his unit’s every move, which delivers us back to the start: belief and discipline.
Metalux is an eccentric female duo from Chicago that has developed this complex sound-machine. It’s an intricate and cacophonous beast — with an anatomy made of numerous retooled instruments, obsolete electronics, and frayed wires slithering all about — that quite enjoys emitting screaming walls of static, nervous Atari 2600 chatter, low-frequency bombs, and countless other snaps and pops. If the girls simply flipped the “on” switch on their machine, then they’d be a conceptual noise project. But they are indie rockers from the Midwest, so they play guitar buried in feedback and chant like androids while herding the beast’s unruly vibrations into something resembling scraping rhythmic accompaniment. At times, this interactive biometal sound-loop feels more like flesh — the rippling dance pulse of “Fastblood” or the throwback guitar jam “Splinter and Shimmer.” Elsewhere, when everything comes together, as on the grating echo-drone epic “Rotisserarie Voodoo Llama,” the respective vibrations of human and machine mesh, trade places, and create an inseparable fabric, which then raises the question: human or machine? Answer: both.
