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Naked Tourist

Mad Different Methods

Parvati (Denmark)

Electro-convulsive music for the psychologically deranged – but falling short of the watermark for decent nighttime music, even by heavyweight label Parvati’s standards. The title track opens the album in an undeniably paranoid tone. Nuff said really, it’s a full-throttle assault with swirly noises, harsh lines, big sounds and a generally agitated vibe throughout.

Double REL’s Prehistoric Moments gets the Naked Tourist treatment with plenty of thunk and chunk, although to be honest I prefer the original cut from last year’s BOOO cd on Doof. This version, while blistering and violent, seems to have lost some of the grace that the original had. Nice noises, nice lines, but less soul. Chopper is decent, having a very individual sound and plenty going on in it to keep you interested. A creepy topend fades in and out, while chunky midrange provides substance. It escalates like a dream (okay, like a nightmare then) up to a peak that almost has your teeth growing out through the bottom of your face; very tasty indeed, but it doesn’t really go many places after this: it sort of fizzles out, which is a pity.

Noname is hard thrashy trance: we’ve come further than this. It seems as though the whole dark-psytrance thing has evolved past smacking you on the back of the head until you bleed from the ears – but this doesn’t seem to do anything but that. There aren’t many changes, and there’s not much to spark the interest. Another remix up next, this time Limbogott’s Hirnfräse. And yes, this works – the industrial clank works nicely against a breaksy/slomojungle midsection and the subsequent frenzied sonic attack. Nice.

Asylunatic has a corking run up to the peak, it just keeps getting more and more intense as it goes. One mental break later, and it’s continuing up and up and up the scale, until it just lifts the roof off. Backup Paranoia is dark psy by numbers. Yes the sounds are fat, the kick is relentless, but it sounds like we’re going through the motions, and nothing more. Fairchild is in the same vein, we’re talking full twist here folks, this one perhaps goes slightly more insane than the rest of the tracks here but, compared with recent darker stuff that has innovation, humour and funk, this sounds decidedly underdeveloped. Frustratingly, there’s a hidden track at the end which is actually bloody good – acidic swirly breaks, streets ahead of anything else here in the quality stakes. Seriously, it’s one of the better psy-breaks tunes I’ve come across. Funky, twisted, gnarly – it’s everything I wanted the rest of the album to be. All in all then, this is a bit of an awkward one. A whole artist album’s worth of dark psy material either has to be very humorous, different, or both – check Megalopsy or even Scorb for examples of what I’m on about. Unfortunately, Mad Different Methods is neither.

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