OZRIC TENTACLES — Afterswish (review)

OZRIC TENTACLES — Afterswish album cover Boxset / Compilation · 1991 · Jazz Related Rock Buy this album from MMA partners
3.5/5 ·
M.Neumann
The prolific space rockers of Ozric Tentacles have enjoyed a remarkably consistent (maybe too consistent) musical career since their humble underground origins in the mid-1980s. From the beginning the band has stuck to what certainly turned out to be a durable formula, extending the psychedelic legacy of Hawkwind and Steve Hillage with a kick of adrenalin strong enough to punch a hole in your headphones (and straight through the center of your head).

A generous cross-section of those early recordings is compiled here on a two-disc CD sampler drawn from the band's home-made and self-distributed cassette tapes, made between 1985 and 1989. The music here predates the inevitable boost in publicity that would follow the growth of the World Wide Web over the next decade, but anyone with even the smallest exposure to the Ozrics will know what to expect: dynamic instrumental jams in a Middle or Far Eastern mode, alternating with blissful techno-trance interludes and echo-heavy dub workouts.

The production may lack the digital polish of their later studio albums, but the energy and invention (and the esoteric humor: check out some of the nonsensical track titles) is already well developed. Without a doubt, this was (and still is) a group of motivated hippies: combining all the cosmetic earmarks of a counterculture aesthetic (eye-popping mandala artwork; colorful thrift-shop wardrobe) with a dedication to musical expression out of step with the strictly mercantile fashions of popular culture in the 1980s.

The original cassettes have since been re-issued in digital form, as both a six-pack box set and on separate discs (with two full cassettes on each CD). But honestly, this twin-disc compilation works just as well, and maybe better, than the unexpurgated tapes, summing up the formative era of the Ozrics in one concise and comprehensive package.
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