Camera Obscura Records
1997
Universal Mind Decoder
About This Album
The title of Boston-based band Abunai!'s debut album is nicked from the Byrds, and this Universal Mind Decoder shares with that band an evocative mysticism that is delicate yet loses nothing in musical potency. Abunai! (a warning cry meaning "Look out!" commonly used in Japanese anime) directs its music less toward the pop end of the spectrum, however, and more toward a spacious, sweeping, and sound-intensive strain of psychedelia full of phased vocals, spacey sound effects, guitar distortion, and tribal drumming. The music, amazingly enough, meshes melodic, drone-based space-rock, P-Funk (particularly in the low end), pensive folk-rock, and shoegazer pop together so that Universal Mind Decoder could be seen as a sort of Cliff's notes to psychedelia from the past 30 years. But Abunai! doesn't rest on the laurels of a psychedelic past and brings to its music something too often missing in psychedelia: a gentleness -- even subtlety -- that loses nothing in grandiose power. It is music capable of whisking you away and, in the same instant, disorienting you with its sense of foreboding. Everything that Abunai! plays, from Celtic folk to trippy hymns, takes on a slow-cooking, heated ambience complete with modal scales, expressive riffs, well-manicured gales of distortion, and heavy drumming that amounts to music that both takes you away in its gradually building momentum and weighs on your consciousness like something that you can't quite grasp but know is important.
Track List (try tracks 1,2,3,5,7 and 9)

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