Girl Sweat Pleasure Temple Ritual Band – Hyper Rituals
That mouthful of a band name makes more sense when you parse it out with the knowledge that the GSPTRB is, in part at least, the product of Leeds head Girl Sweat (you either know him or you don’t at this point). Building from formative garage-rock beginnings, here he leads a seven-strong cult through the opening exchanges of a riotous debut LP. A whirlwind of kraut, psych, noise and pitched somewhere between hedonism and nihilism, it’s all a sure bet to be massive live, but the struggle to convincingly contain even a sliver of all that coiled potential on record is real.
Nonetheless this maximal three-track opus swirls stomping grooves into sweat-lodge suffocation impressively, opener “Mantra Of The Pleasure Temple” a claustrophobic cloud of squalling sax that rips the breath from your lungs like all the world’s parties crushing together in a dangerous vortex. Remarkably this is the just the warm-up, for it’s followed by two 13-minute blasters, the first of which, “Rite To Power”, lets tribal drumming and manic screeches do the damage until some huge, ponderous guitar riffs are rifled from the Black Mountain stable, whipping up a fervour like some incitement to violence. Sweat’s distorted oratory downright demands subservience, the track’s stable groove later descending into garbled noise and free-jazz marauding.
Hot on its heels comes “The Incarnation Of Pleasure”, misfiring organ keys and sci-fi FX jumbling together as if at war. Cranking through the gears to establish a Hookworms-style sense of overdrive, the whole thing hurtles through space and time, heavy streams of drums and synth creating a vacuum that, at critical mass, causes the onslaught to implode into a two-minute outro that’s finally a relative oasis of meditation. Hyper Rituals is all a real hoot, but ultimately there’s just a touch too much going on to be able to really grab a hold of anything meaningful.
~Hyper Rituals is out March 24th 2018 via Evil Hoodoo.~