Album Review
Mellow Out is an ironic title if ever there was one: as far as mind- and speaker-blowing experiences go, Mainliner's 1996 debut is difficult to top. Nobody could accuse Asahito Nanjo of pussyfooting around with his noise-mongering outfit High Rise, but he ups the ante on this ultra-heavy, brain-atomizing record, ably assisted by Acid Mothers Temple's Makoto Kawabata and Hajime Koizumi. For the duration of Mellow Out all the needles are stuck firmly in the red, its 35 minutes terminally fuzzed-out and distorted. This definitely isn't a record you'd use to demonstrate the quality of your stereo system. Indeed, the band's apparent scorn for production values makes the inclusion of a production credit appear somewhat comic. Although Nanjo (bass) and Koizumi (drums) lay down a crushing, seemingly monolithic bottom end, amid the weighty layers of that foundation the pair also sustain patterns of rhythmic complexity — without descending into jazz noodling. Meanwhile, Kawabata's guitar veers between earth moving riffage and shrieking, eviscerating extended solos. Woody Guthrie had "This Machine Kills Fascists" emblazoned on his instrument, but Kawabata's axe is utterly undiscriminating: nobody is spared its wrath. Having kicked out the jams with the frantic sub-two-minute opener "Cockamamie," the record gives itself over to a pair of quarter-hour-plus behemoths, "Black Sky" and "M" (what its title lacks in letters, the track makes up for in noise). These numbers churn and grind, alternating between pulverizing riffs and scything white-knuckle freak-out, as Nanjo's curiously disembodied vocals float over the fray in a cloud of reverb. Mellow Out suggests previous power trios like Cream, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Guru Guru and Blue Cheer, all locked in a room together and jamming to the death. This is molten acid rock, psychedelic in that it rearranges the senses — not with fey whimsy but with sheer brute force.
