Acid Mothers Temple - "Last Concert In Tokyo"

Bye-bye hi-fi. High fidelity, that is. For this, the umpteenth live release from Acid Mothers Temple, exists not as a less-than-perfect document of a raucous live show, but as the audio equivalent of the sludge that gets squeegeed from the floor after a raucous live show. Drums blur into static, the bass is occasionally audible, but the guitar is lost. The most prominent instruments on this recording appear to be Cotton Casino and Higashi Hiroshi's synthesizers. Pushing the tolerance of even the hardcore collector, Last Concert in Tokyo sounds like Merzbow, in that every "melody" is subsumed by complete noise and overdriven microphones. And that's a shame, because when Acid Mothers are on, they're on, and this sounds like a show where they were really feeling it. But it is absolutely no pleasure to listen to, for the low-quality mono recording and the annoyance of having four tracks listed on the back cover, but all are indexed as one long track. Avoid.

1 star