ALBUM REVIEWS

Acid King, Beyond Vision Blues Funeral acidking.bandcamp.com/album/beyond-vision

Acid King’s new full-length, Beyond Vision (Blues Funeral), wasn’t originally intended to be an Acid King record at all. As lead guitarist, front woman, and sole permanent member Lori S. (aka Lori Joseph) told Guitar World magazine in a February interview, she meant to make an experimental collaborative album with guitarist Jason Landrian of Black Cobra. Along the way they acquired bassist Bryce Shelton and drummer Jason Willer, so that a full-band sound emerged. And what a sound it is. Acid King are a pillar of the stoner-metal genre, and though they’ve been active since 1993, they haven’t released a new album since 2015 or toured since 2019 (when they commemorated the 20th anniversary of the landmark Busse Woods, named for the forest preserve near Joseph’s hometown in Chicago’s northwest suburbs). This is as powerful a comeback as anyone could have hoped for.

Eventually, Joseph and her comrades accepted that Beyond Vision was an Acid King record. It maintains the raw heaviness of the band’s classic sound while adding synths and keyboards (played by Shelton and Landrian, respectively) to create a lush psychedelic garden of noise whose fluid transitions and satisfying climaxes are never rushed, always earned, and consistently infused with deep cosmic patience. Willer’s dense but steady drumming carries “Color Trails” to a mesmerizing conclusion, and an eerie spacescape in “One Light Second Away” stalks along underneath heavy riffs, leading into a release worthy of the moment in 2001: A Space Odyssey when David Bowman says, “My god—it’s full of stars.” The majestic terror of “90 Seconds” evokes the idea of death in space (in a

The songs on Beyond Vision are so good that I could never fathom ranking them, but for me one of the brightest highlights is the shi ing, phasing planetary landscape of the long intro to “Electro Magnetic.” Joseph’s transcendent, agonized lead guitar writhes like a serpent in the hand of an angry god before finding escape through the track’s major dynamic shi s. Acid King have booked a few oneoff dates in California and Texas, and they’re hitting the European festival circuit, so let’s hope they come to Chicago before too long. In the meantime, Beyond Vision is a gourmet treat for your headphones—or you could blast it through speakers and wait for your neighbors to thank you for turning them on to Acid King’s warm, heavy sounds.

—MONICA KENDRICK

Mats Gustafsson & Joachim

Nordwall, Their Power Reached Across Space and Time—to Defy Them Was Death—or Worse

Thrill Jockey gustafssonnordwall.bandcamp.com

Free improvisers, experimental musicians, and foley artists differ in their methods, but practitioners of all three arts can unite around their attraction to sounds that’ll raise your hackles. This collaboration between improvisational woodwinds player Mats Gustafsson and electronic musician Joachim Nordwall (of the Skull Defekts and the iDealist) could soundtrack a bookshelf full of straight-to-video freak-out flicks. The hyperbolic, mostly all-caps titles that these two Swedes have conferred upon the record’s eight tracks suggest that they aren’t unaware of this. “THERE ARE SOME WORLDS WHERE DREAMS ALL DIE (en glad stund),” for example, opens the album with a commingling of bring-out-the-dead cadences and lung-withering exhalations that will give your subwoofer and the more panic-inclined recesses of your unconscious a workout. Many of the sounds on the album could perform cinematic functions or trigger a reflexive response from an unsuspecting audience. The sputtering synths on “LOVE SHOWS IN HER SMILE: IT IS CONFIDENT (panik),” for instance, could score a ray-gun shoot-out scene. If the subliminal pulses and long tones on fluteophone (a flute fitted with an alto sax mouthpiece) from “OH, SAID THE STRANGE MIND, YOU WANT ME TO THINK FOR YOU (det blir aldrig bättre)” don’t have your date leaning into your neck to hide their eyes, they’re really not into you. —BILL

MEYER

Baaba Maal, Being

Marathon spektralquartet.com/btw-project

Senegalese superstar Baaba Maal has been recording for close to four decades, and at age 69 he still sounds relentlessly, almost eerily contemporary. While his first album, 1984’s Djam Leelii , features himself and his teacher Mansour Seck on acoustic guitars in a mesmerizing, fluid triumph of griot tradition, he’s since embraced electronics and trans- national collaboration. Maal has forged an uplifting, soulful, and danceable Afrofuturist sound that also feels rooted in the past—director Ryan Coogler and composer Ludwig Göransson cannily recruited him to collaborate on music for the Black Panther films (and he makes a cameo as a funeral singer in Wakanda Forever).

On his new record, Being (Marathon), Maal continues to experiment without losing his signature sound. “Yerimayo Celebration” is a deep, heavy track reminiscent of dub or the work of the innovative electronic artists released by South African label Gqom Oh!—Maal’s unmistakable vocals soar above while the bass thumps hard enough to shake your sternum. “Freak Out” is fuzzed-out dreamy psychedelia, with Maal and Malawian singer Esau Mwamwaya (formerly of the Very Best) switching leads while chasing each other into the stratosphere. “Agreement,” by contrast, turns back toward the sparseness of Maal’s earliest work; while there’s a big, measured beat, the drama is in his guitar playing and his amazing voice, which moves between intimate whispers and an ecstatic call that seems to sweep into heaven itself. In a career filled with gems, this is another highlight.

—NOAH BERLATSKY v