Gotta say, I didn't know there were 8 of these. I bought an LP called Spiritual Jazz back at Cheap Thrills in the day and thought that was the end of it. Turns out over the years Jazzman has been putting out a survey of spiritual jazz across the globe? I thought Japan would be a good country to jump back into the series on. It's a cool set, I'll let someone else argue over just how much of these are spiritual, but some killer cuts - Tadao Hayashi with an absolutely stomping rendition of "My Favorite Things", the queasy weirdness of Keitaro Miho's "Kikazaru", Takeo Moriyama combining traditional Japanese instrumentation with bebop on "East Plants" and the only artist I knew off the top of my head coming in, Masayuki Takayanagi's New Direction For the Arts' "Sun in the East". Good stuff.
I keep up with Sunburned only intermittently these days, they seem to be taking a more rock-ist approach lately. Like this one. Each track is about 4-5 minutes of pretty ramshackle, jammy, funky, boogie rock...almost spoiled by the throaty, beery vocals shouted over the top of each one of these tunes with nonsensical platitudes. I almost shut it off after a couple tracks but I stuck it out and kinda came around on some level. I was oddly reminded of My War era Black Flag sludge punk. The band sez "these Holy Grail fueled recordings are a mix of iphone and zoom recordings run through garageband, reaper and some plug-ins. We're still working on the much more listener-friendly Black Dirt session..." and point taken, listener friendly this ain't.
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