Ozric Tentacles
Jurassic Shift

The Ozric Tentacles are known for their phenomenal and eccentric culinary skills, and it is acknowledged that in this "Jurassic Shift" (1993) they have literally outdone themselves. But what exactly is brewing in the pot? Something like a dozen genres, particularly progressive seasoned with a spicy and refined psychedelia, space rock filled with juicy and sparkling electronic/ambient, and even a unique sprinkle of new age/folk. And I'll stop there.

The result of these quirky experiments is a hallucinogenic and amorphous dish with bewildering aromas and... Spacey.

"Sun Hair" is a shower of mutant bubbles and alienating solos, hypnotic in their subtle and imperceptible madness, while "Stretchy" is a more elongated track aimed at the hyperspatial void, with those electric discharges that seem to come from a guitar ravaged by a tyrannosaurus and those moments of electronic ebullience that flow like a stream of extraterrestrial data - don't ask me what that means because right now I'm sniffing the album at full volume.

But with "Feng Shui", the band's more "spiritual" side emerges for a moment, that is, the more folk-oriented one; after a sprinkling of flutes, an actual cascade of sounds of all kinds enters the scene: chimes, tribal percussion, hints of plucked instruments (which I honestly cannot recognize) here and there, underwater echoes, and a fun rise and fall of electronic moans; all the madness and the heterogeneity of sounds that paraded in nine minutes then condense into a single furious guitar riff that I would honestly have seen fitting better in a thrash metal track, but the Ozric are the Ozric, and that guitar assault would fit well in any of their songs.

Decidedly more focused on the folk/new age vein is the intense "Half Light in Thillai" where we hear playfully crackling bongos – but are they really bongos? Who knows, but they're nice anyway. The title track, "Pteranodon", and the rest of the tracks best synthesize the "ozrichian" spirit (allow me the neologism), ever more psychedelic and insanely astral, reprising sounds that risk exploding due to the stratospheric and compelling imagination demonstrated by the group so far.

So, don’t expect anything particular from this CD. In truth, it doesn't aim to take you anywhere, but it is the journey that should be enjoyed as it is, without expectations of arrival and letting oneself be carried away by the delirious and audacious genius of the mad Tentaclefolks. Recommended for those who want to get high without the use of any kind of drug.