OZO Pluto Archives - The Obelisk

Album Review: OZO, Pluto

Posted in Reviews on August 5th, 2020 by JJ Koczan

Nothing matters out here in the abyss.

“They” say no one can hear you scream in space, but “they” say all kinds of stupid shit to sell movie tickets. Tell it to the sax. Or tell it to the saz.

It’s Karl D’Silva on the former, Mike Vest (Bong, et al) on the latter as well as bass and guitar, and Graham Thompson doing the yeoman’s work on drums for this second transmission from the outer outer far out outer. Pluto, that woeful, coulda-been-somebody planetesimal, tracks in terms of distance with where OZO are coming from in the Drone Rock Records LP follow-up to Feb. 2020’s Saturn.

Five slabs to stretch out upon, a vaguely digestible 40-ish minutes in total, but what a 40 minutes. Freakery abounds as sax and the Turkish saz combine and the guitar issues effects waves like dictatorial proclamations, the drums doing duly whacked jazz snare insistence as if the point might be driven directly into the listener’s skull — and, rest assured, there are moments on Pluto where that feels like exactly what is happening. Looking at you, “Fine Tune Abuser.”

That particular 15-minute assault from the eighth dimension is placed second-to-last ahead of the finale in “Kerberos,” but by then the UK trio have already turned your brain into so much blood sausage that all that’s really left to do is wrap it in some intestine and take it to market.

Doom jazz. Space jazz. Cosmic battery of cymbals crashing. It’s somehow-improvised madness, the kind of claustrophobia one might feel in a vacuum, operating in a bound-to-be-misunderstood-or-worse-overlooked quadrant of the galaxy that the likes of Blind Idiot God have been known to inhabit while unquestionably finding its own way to oblivion. It careens there, and it courses and it runs and it dies and it lives and it kills and it saves along the way — up, down, in, out, wailing and woodchipping whatever it finds.

The human psyche wasn’t built for this, but let’s take Pluto‘s howls and shoot them out beyond the Kuiper Belt and see if the aliens get back and are like, “Wow you guys are really weird.” You know, really sass the neighbors, fireworks and all that. Elon Musk wishes this was what his brain was like: an on-its-own-wavelength shimmer of untamed will, not just refusing to bend, but refusing to be unbent.

There is nothing arcane about it. “Ninety Nine Years” ain’t cult rock, and nobody here is trying to convince you they’re Dracula or some shit. This is real-deal, spit-in-the-face-of-expectation creativity, and if that isn’t horror enough, they’ll turn structure on its head 50 times as they churn through the suitably vast reaches of “Pluto” and the somehow-motorik centerpiece “Hydra,” which might be classy if you consider showing up to the party dripping wet in a car made from a giant whelk shell class.

It’s hard to know at any moment what’s coming next since inevitably that’s more of the same which is wild and intangible. You spend your time trying to get a handle on it and maybe that’s missing the point. OZO aren’t the frog to be dissected, or the Grey laying across the metal table. They’re the band. Tip the band. Tip, tip, tip the band.

Or whatever it is you kids do these days. You kids with your far-out, all-the-way-gone hyper-lysergics. You kids out there getting laid on the holodeck. You kids throwing rocks at your elders with your telekinetic powers. That’s not even fair. Come on now.

Melt and wash away, maybe. Maybe tell the constable it’s time to get fucked twice and bear out the scorch. Maybe. How many channels. You’ll need all of them. Pluto. From the bark, you dummies.

We live in a galaxy of ass. Who among you? I ask. Who among you?