Sonic! Soaring! Triclops! “Out of Africa” explodes with solar flare sensations, combusting and gasping, leaving you scorched to just the right degree. Listen with a glass of water close by. Listen with the windows open so as to reduce pressure. Listen to it on cassette and sense the analog tape’s trepidation in trying to contain such a force. Listen to what these other folks have to say:
“Triclops! takes punk songs and runs them through a meat grinder of precision polyrhythms, digitally effected vocals, swarming chord progressions and gut-wrenching riffs and dizzying loops. The overall effect is disorienting, captivating…
The band members play like musical mercenaries, hired to commit war crimes and executing their direct orders with shameless efficiency. The guitars are constantly running through augmented scales over frantic but controlled drum fills. But what cements everything are the piercing vocals, run through different amps and distortion settings, sounding like a voice breaking through dimensional barriers on the album’s shining opener “March of the Half-Babies.”
The best interpretation of the music, however, could be an examination of the album’s artwork by Lee Harvey Roswell, on display in full as the band’s Top 8 on their MySpace page. Featuring centaurian beasts stacked on top of each other, wearing white gloves and clown noses, ripping into the fabric of reality with their hooves, holding the sun as a balloon tied to an umbrella handle and suckling the teats of the one of top of them, the artwork is all at once disturbing, surrealist, absurdist and awe-inspiring. You can’t explain what it is without being able to show it to someone, and the same holds true for their music.” –Punknews.org
“Out of Africa…will make you believe in a Philip Dick-like unearthly telepathic consciousness.”–Popmatters.com
“Science fiction authors forewarn the dangers of gene-splicing and its freakish byproduct, but in an Alternative Tentacles tome, “freakish” is a desirable trait. Triclops! (“!” is part of the name) is one such result of SF Bay Area inter-band splicing (featuring members of Bottles and Skulls and the Lower Forty-Eight fortified by personnel from AT stalwarts Victims Family and Fleshies), assaulting the public with the best acid punk around today. Don’t let their pedigree fool you: Triclops! Turns the dial down on the bellicose punk/hardcore you might expect, instead opting for meandering yet tension-filled psychedelic epics. The band started in 2005 with John (Fleshies) and Christian (Bottles and Skulls) laying down tapes filled with echo-laden guitars and drums, vocals run through broken solid state amps with phaser explosion. The duo attacked noise pedals/tape loops/randomly modified guitars and began to realize the band required a rhythm section. In the beginning of 2006, they enlisted monster drummer Phil and Alternative Tentacles veteran Larry Boothroyd on bass. Positive reviews followed their 2006 “Cafeteria Brutalia” EP on Sick Room (engineered by Phil Manley of Trans Am/Fucking Champs) and a picture-disc 7-inch on GSL. By the end of 2007, Triclops! had shared the stage with The Melvins, Comets On Fire, The Locust, Acid Mother’s Temple, Qui, Dragons of Zynth, Don Caballero, Big Business and many other amazing and awful bands. The seven songs on Out of Africa, their first full-length, are reminiscent of the golden hits from the 1990s Touch and Go or Amphetamine Reptile catalogs, tweaked out on the exhilarating paranoia typical of America in the early aughts. Recorded by the Melvins’ engineer Kurt Schlegel; distorted vocals, oscillating bass lines, and jittery guitars form a nervous, seasick swath over the plodding drums. Songs unfurl into worlds of their own with byzantine lyrics -the lament of an Iraqi museum curator in one, an ode to the botfly (a tropical parasite) in another – while the music explores variations in tone and urgency. Pry open your third eye with this finest morsel of acid punk-prog.”–from Triclops! Youtube page
We’ve got the tape! Alternative Tentacles has the LP and CD. Starcleaner has the toy with usb device. What more do you need?
Triclops! [above] Todd C. [below] Jacob [below-after] Triclops! [movie below next-after]…enjoy and get in touch for pre-orders!
Reasons…..
