Spiritual Emergency

Guardian Alien's music, which, driven by Greg Fox's questing, cyclical drumming, creates wide and wondrous vistas. [Feb 2014, p.54]

Amidst the palpitated urgings of bass and the rapid skimmings of guitar, Fox’s drumkit emerges as the key figure here, the volatility of his technique underscoring the fact that, as soon as you efface the certainties and the contrived precision of the external world, the once incontrovertible dimensions of the self go with it.

The epic finally coalesces into an explosive, screaming climax that finds clarity in chaos.

If the first half feels a little like a warm-up, they deliver the payoff in fine style and by the end you may feel as worn out as the band must be.

It's perhaps unfortunate that Guardian Alien fall into the cliché of extended, trippy freak-out at the last moment, as Spiritual Emergency toys with as of yet unheard musical syntax, touching upon some peculiar motifs and hinting at perhaps full future maturity and subsequent greatness.

Shamelessly self-indulgent, you imagine their aim is to jam themselves into a sonic trance as much as the listener.

It will take a patient, contemplative listener to fully appreciate the picture that emerges.

After Grof’s narration drifts away, Fox and company do their best to push and pull at the tempo, to spin like a Sufi, to stretch out yogic, to get into the monastic mystic chanting, breaking free of the everyday and into the spiritual.

Mitral Transmission is a fascinating album, then, a would-be footnote that reveals Fox’s willingness to mine most anything for sound. Sometimes, as on the first half of Spiritual Emergency, that process can lead to messy results. But elsewhere, it’s the power pushing Guardian Alien and Fox past their past associations and into a wonderfully strange and unpredictable future.

The effect is rather like Post-Super ae Boredoms, which is a great sound to achieve, but they only nail it sporadically. [No. 106, p.55]