Monday 19 December 2011

Dave's 500 Bus Albums No 21 - F/i "Blanga" (2005)

"Blanga" is a little known term for the kind of extended slow heavy rock jamming typical of long-haired Space Rock bands. And by Space Rock I don't mean Muse or Spiritualized. I mean Space Rock in its original sense - Hawkwind circa 1972, Pink Floyd very occasionally circa 1967 (see "Intersteller Overdrive"), and more recently bands like Farflung and Litmus.

F/i are an American Space Rock band who've been around since about 1984. This album is their celebration of the genre they are most associated with. Every song on the album has the word "blanga" in the title (from "An Extremely Lovely Girl Dreams of Blanga" to "Grandfather Blanga and his Band Light it Up").

This music is crushing, doom-laden and extremely heavy. Drums pound relentlessly, guitars pick a riff and stick with it until the song fades out (most blanga fades out, giving the impression that the jam is continuing and we're the ones who have to leave). There are no verses, no chorus, no vocals, no bridge, no middle-eight. There is also no guitar solo, or if there is, it lasts the whole song. You can't dance to it, but you can head-bang...in slow motion. There may be keyboards, but there are definitely synths swirling and bleeping all the way through. All combining to give the impression that You're on a monstrous behemoth of a space ship tearing through the universe, engines at max, stars shooting by in a cascade of relativistic Doppler shifts. This is Space Rock.

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