Review Summary: A psych-induced psychotic break somewhere in the woods at night
I had the rare opportunity to immerse myself in this screaming wall of demonic blare, along with 22 hours of other noise albums of varying degrees of harshness and chaos, on a 2 day drive to Florida for vacation. My wife had decided to fly with the kids to spare them the long days of driving, and I decided to make the drive solo to avoid having to rent a car while we were there. I took this opportunity to take a plunge into a style I’ve flirted with here and there, but never found myself really committing to, from a fair few power electronics eviscerations to the gleeful pants-shitting of Kazumoto Endo, to Merzbow’s more nuanced and psychedelic works, to the variegated textures and explorations of Pedestrian Deposit. To make sure I stayed the course on this venture, I deleted all my music from my phone except for these albums and 3 nostalgia picks to act as palate cleansers, albums I hadn’t heard in years and which at one point had been at the forefront of my listening. Rocket Shrine found me somewhere in Virginia on the evening of the first day, after Worship and Tribute demonstrated an ability to age like whisky over the decades, and just before Vomir and Trou’s endless roar into the void ground my will to persevere through this dim vale into the dirt.
Rocket Shrine, one of the more unique noise experiences on my venture, could be described as a rending blare above a stark, desolate howling into the enveloping waves. It’s piercing, droning, oddly psychedelic in its artificially bright, hazed out roar of texture, comparable maybe to Merzbow’s Hybrid Noisebloom, but less varied in structure, more vast in its attack, more of a looming, swirling presence compared to the sometimes frenetic explorations of Mr. Akita’s psych-noise project. The effect is all-encompassing and deeply sinister, a stumble through dark woods under chemical effects, a strange, piercing glow in the distance. Seichi Yamamoto appears to give some Boredoms-member street cred to the proceedings, his guitar on Noise of the Mountain Spirit layering a sense of spaced-out exploration to what is probably the harshest track on the album. Mayuko Hino’s blaring, wailing theremin provides the lost soul’s lament in all the smothering rush, like the ghost of some banshee calling from the blackness. At nearly an hour, Rocket shrine, in all its relentless, crushing roar, becomes rather an endurance test, something that it becomes hard to continue to subject oneself to alone, let as part of some multi-day masochistic noise slog. C.C.C.C.’s other works tend more towards a blissful, gentle noise atmosphere, as committed to noise as emotional expression as to a dense crush of unbreathable atmosphere. As such, Rocket Shrine may not be the best starting point for this group. But it is, in its unique, haunting, terror-blare, just as rich and evocative as any of their other works.
