Kandodo
k2o

LA RECENSIONE

If there's a band, after the glory days of the Pink Floyd in the '60s, that managed to create something new in the UK psychedelic scene, it's certainly Spacemen 3.

To think about it, they didn't have some sort of genius breakthrough, but, as we know, it's much harder to make simple things special than the other way around. Basically, they combined the hypnotic guitar sound of late '60s Detroit (Stooges and MC5) with the sparse and contemporary sound of the Velvet Underground, honoring the brilliance of the Texan psychedelia of the 13th Floor Elevators, mixing it all with opiate proto-ambient moments, made of rudimentary analog electronics.

In this Spacemen 3-aligned wave falls the second album by Kandodo, the pseudonym behind which hides the Albion Simon Price, leader of the cult heavy rockers “The Heads”.

If the previous album indulged in a psychedelic paean to the South Africa where Price grew up, eliciting more yawns than kaleidoscopic visions, this “K2O” reveals itself as a more concise and better-focused work (if one can define it so for an instrumental album that makes timelessness and repetition its strengths). The first three tracks are moderately short, yet complete in themselves: from the delayed intro of “Slowah”, moving to the beautiful psychedelic drone experiment with sampled voices (“Grace And”) and the folk sketch of “Waves.” Then things get a bit tougher, with the 12 minutes of “Kandy Rock Mountain”, perhaps the album's only misstep, somewhat redundant with its perpetually looping guitar refrain. Then comes the 8 minutes of “July 28th”, a warm, dazed chant for tambourine and slide guitar (as the date suggests). The pièce de résistance is the final track, “Swim Into The Sea”, 22 minutes, which not only represents almost half of the album but is perhaps its highest point. A track with a structure that deviates from the almost arrhythmic repetition of the previous tracks, enriched with echoes of Hawkwind with fuller guitars, similar to what Price does in The Heads.

The album is, of course, for insiders and enthusiasts of the genre, like myself.