Dreamweapon – Rites Of Lunacy
Until it resurfaced digitally last year, Rites of Lunacy was the “lost” Dreamweapon album, recorded in 2016 and only now seeing a physical release. It’s some weapon too, the Portuguese psych trio, who take their name from the Spaceman 3 release of the same name, conjuring a dark set of hypnotic loops and black ambience, trapped half way between the dark side of the moon and some lonely peyote sweat-lodge. The meditative twangs of the title-track consequently have a shamanistic quality, indecipherable chatter, heavy breathing and a menacing undertow threatening to turn the trip bad.
A heady cocktail of back-masked effects, warped rhythms and wood-block shuffles follow, mesmeric oscillations coursing down the rabbit hole. Uneasy, knife-sharpening tension meets ghostly groaning, sheet-metal rippling behind rubbery grooves and space-rock FX, disembodied souls floating around purgatory, a glottal pulse keeping things organic in the cold and paranoid eight-minute closer. Only “Odum” deviates from the script, the rickety spirit of post-punk in its melancholy DNA, rimshot repeats and bleak bass riffs hung in suspension, the whole thing then scorched with interstellar blasters that irradiate the speakers with pure distortion. There’s out-there and then there’s far-out; the line is just a dot to Dreamweapon.
Best track: “Odum”
~Rites Of Lunacy is released January 29th via the collaborative efforts of Cardinal Fuzz and Little Cloud Records.~