Munehiro Narita – Live P.S.F.
Remember gigs? Your ears still no doubt ringing if you were there back in 2017, here’s one you’d never forget. In what must have been an incredible experience to see live, shredathon sensei Munehiro Narita absolutely laid it down at the (more recently closed) Hemlock Tavern, bringing his Performance San Francisco/Psychedelic Speed Freaks movement to the west coast for four incendiary dates backed by local heads David Jasso and TJ Lemieux.
At it since the 70s in various cult outfits before founding heavy-psych power trio High Rise and then more recently Green Flames, this show’s six tracks draw from both of these bands’ cacophonous catalogues, Ethan Miller of Comets On Fire somehow channelling the fury through the soundboard so it could now be pressed to wax. The experiment was so successful that Narita, Jasso and Lemieux would later go on to form PSF the band, their equally essential debut coming out last year on Black Editions. Which all leads to “PSF” the track, a super-charged take of acid-fried, biker-baiting riffing that descends into some tympanic-torturing scree.
A proto-punk rager, “Truth” in turn unleashes its bootleg-style squall and INSANE soloing, full-frontal feedback drawn out to ass-kicking space-rock proportions, Narita spitting out some punk haiku with sheer abandon. The gnarly, pedal-to-the-metal “Sadame” is then a blown-out blitzkrieg of a party, while “Outside Gentiles” is like being caught in a pyroclastic flow of skull-spitting righteousness. Varying the tempo albeit only fleetingly, the relentless sludge of “Human Nature” delivers head-banging kosmiche to the tune of the brutal Green Flames wah-drive original, vitrifying your synapses into black glass as the pace inevitably quickens. Closing with mega-jam “Popsicle”, Narita signs off with two fingers up to the beleaguered PA and some of the wildest weapons-grade guitar ever committed to posterity. It slays. Narita slays, his Live PSF a siren call for all absent gig-goers the world over.
~Live P.S.F. is released May 22nd 2020 via the collaborative efforts of Cardinal Fuzz and Feeding Tube Records.~