OnYou, Chicago’s dark lords of Psychedelic Rock, returned this month with Recovering the Baseband Signal, a nearly 70-minute LP out via Captcha Records. This is the follow-up to the band’s outstanding, sold-out cassette from last month, Follow the Music, Follow the Light, and Captcha reports that they had to “dig deep into the vaults of the onYou catalog in order to resurrect this massive record.” Recovering the Baseband Signal finds the quintet flexing it’s muscles across five stunning long-form jams, while demonstrating themselves to be sonic psychonauts of the highest order! Check out our review following the embed…
OnYou returned this month to demonstrate their formidable improvisational powers, delivering Recovering the Baseband Signal, five long-form jams that find the band trekking deep into unmapped astral territories for sonic encounters of the strangest kind! Captcha Records has unearthed these tracks from what we can only assume, after listening to the new LP, must be a fairly deep stash of onYou goodies, and while the label reports that some of the historical data for the sessions has been “clouded in purple haze”, we know that for these recordings the band included Stan Wood on guitar, synth, and vocals, Mikey Ricketts and Michael Neuhaus on drums, Jamie Drier on bass, and Josh Coyle on guitar. Together, this crew conducts some very interesting sonic experiments of the magickal variety, using their well-seasoned understanding of the Psych Rock lexicon, and improvisational music, to travel widely, while coaxing a whole host of odd visitors into their midst.
For the album’s opener, “Al-Zaidi’s Shoe“, a tangle of drums send out some serious smoke signals, summoning the freak tribes to assemble, and before long they respond in-kind, building to a gritty cacophony of strange electronics, black muddy guitar, and deeply buried, off-kilter vocals. When onYou stokes the flames of this potent brew, a host of industrial sounding apparitions are made to appear and bubble about, until later, the drums find a fifth gear, whipping the energies into a whirling dervish of noise, before frying-out into the ether.
On “WASP-14b“, the band takes a bit of a different tack, cooling out into the black evening on a sticky hash vibe. The track’s thick aroma hangs in the air, while the bass and drums interweave a rhythmic spell, and electronic layers drone and spin melodies from out of the darkness. Wood & Co. pass the long night in rapt absorption, until near the track’s close, a guitar’s chiming tones seem to sound the first light of morning. And while, under normal conditions, that might be cause for comfort, further inspection reveals that it’s not the sun rising, but instead, the eery light of the Black Zero.
On Recovering the Baseband Signal‘s third track, heavy, black clouds of guitar smoke lift, and in the first light of the “Black Zero“, it is as though scorched earth can be seen smoldering with noxious fumes. We hear someone coughing on the track, voices seem to mill about in the dark light as the guitar and bass join forces to present some menacing propositions. Before long, though, an odd calm settles in with a semblance of melody taking shape, and as we accept our new surroundings a soaring synth-line heralds the amazing, though not-often witnessed, rising of the Black Zero!
The album closes with two monster jams, “Leave With Somebody“, clocking in at 17:59, and the even longer “Phrase Maker“, at 19:50. “Leave With Somebody” finds our gang of stoned brujos setting out on their motorcycles for a night of debauchery, tearing down the highway at riveting speeds to chase a motorik, darkly turned psych-line. About half-way in to this heavy metal road jam, the guys exchange their hogs for broomsticks, and taking flight they accomplish a subtle array of in-air maneuvers and smokey sky-writing, before seeming to fly straight into a blinding, black light!
The record finishes with the massive slab of audio, “Phrase Maker“. Here, the crew presents a slowly expanding envelope of sound from which serpentine melodies are made to uncoil in a lunar light, before being assembled back into a single massive psychedelic phrase, which the band repeats mantra-like, while strange electric surgeries are performed deep in the psyche of onYou’s sonic body! Recovering the Baseband Signal is available digitally, as well as on CD, and Captcha Records informs us that the band will have more such limited edition releases in the coming months, before putting out their Ultimum Photon A Sole LP in February of 2014!
