Review Summary: The pinnacle of the Ozric Tentacles discography, Jurassic Shift hits the perfect sweet spot between electronic driven grooves and adventurous guitar work.
Whilst Ozric Tentacles has retained the same core blueprint for their sound throughout their career, there was a transitioning point in the early-90s with Arborescence and Become the Other. Prior to those albums, the band excelled at providing wide soundscapes without much in the way of hard-rock instrumentation, rarely focusing on guitar riffs or much lead playing in favour of keyboard led passages and restrained grooves. With Arborescence, a greater emphasis on Eastern scales and rockier riffs altered the focus of the band towards a somewhat more unhinged sound, which was followed with more distinct electronic drum work on later efforts. Capping off the prior era is Jurassic Shift, the band's best and best balanced album.
Pungent Effulgent and Erpland saw the Ozrics master awesome progressions in guitar work and keyboards over simple rhythm grooves, but Jurassic Shift has a greater emphasis on less typical synthesizer sounds and more varied guitar leads. The excellently paced opener
Sunhair makes use of some great flute parts and some tastefully implemented saw synths to establish itself in a more relaxed sonic territory, despite some shifts in the basslines that could threaten to make it too busy otherwise. Similarly, the astonishing title track focuses more on its harmonic-driven guitar leads and leads to the band discovering probably their most beautiful melodies and harmonies with the interaction between them and some great keyboard parts. Sometimes more stripped down arrangements feature as well, and work just as well, such as on
Feng Shui, which features next to no guitar work, carried purely by groove and varied keyboard parts. As per usual, the band excels at swirling, spacy leads and varied textures, which helps in making up for a relatively low guitar-density throughout by their standards.
Unlike earlier Ozric albums, the heavier moments here hold up to the more serene ones.
Pteranodon features a dark, pulsing bassline, allowing its eerie lead parts to flourish; importantly, the track doesn't extend itself quite as much as the more adventurous ones surrounding it, maximising its effect without overly dragging the rest. Additionally, the overall pace of the album is well managed, such that the tracks finishing the album are all fairly short, energetic affairs, sufficiently balancing out the atmospheric first half and keeping any dragging to a minimum, something which plagued the prior few albums. There's overall nothing too crazy or out of the ordinary here by Ozric Tentacles standards, but execution wise the band nails pretty much everything in a fairly short, accessible, and frequently amazingly beautiful package. For somewhat progressive, always intriguing psychedelic rock, few albums will do better than this.
