What the funk? ”Maggot Brain,” was, is, and will arguably forever be an unparalleled bundle of tremendous funk. Indeed, as a result, I would be forsaking my duty to proselytize the good word of music that isn’t rubbish, if I did not beseech you to dive into Magic Lantern’s hazy bucket of tar -“Platoon.” Clinton it ain’t, but “Platoon” strives for, and hits dangerously close to, the benchmark heart of true funk.
Sans any real vocal track “Platoon,” picks up where “Maggot Brain” slowly fuzzed out and I am in love with it. The opener – “Dark Cicadas” - is so frigging fonky that my mind could not override my lower appendages from shucking and jiving. The sultry “Moon Lagoon Platoon” conjures images of the ubiquitous Vietnam film scene where the wayward soldiers blow off steam before heading back into the ”shit,” painting imagery as thick as chilled Jager shots in the jungle night.
If I hadn’t snatched the record from the new releases stack, I’d have sworn sideways that it was a human impossibility that this ill sludge had been recorded after 1973 or 1976 (maybe). Guitars and organs twitch and crescendo and heavy waves reverberate through warm analog tubes. Unlike previous releases, this album is much darker and has a narrower focus. This business is as dark as pre-Christian Samhain rituals on the solstice - just oozing with sludgy psychedelic funk.
Now, I know cats are slinging the word “psychedelic” around like pre-pubescent girls talking about “Justin Beiber” at the “American Girl” Store, but Lantern has earned the title through funk, sweat, and tears. Fret not though, children, this is not sloppy psy-funk, but truly mind-bending, old school, organic bad-assery. Note band images, easily culled from the network, and you will see these lads, heads bent and shoegazing - not at their pedals (though one can imagine the magnitude of incessant toe tapping that must occur to produce this fog) - but as a result of being totally zoned into the ethereal. These corporeal vessels channel, rather than just merely produce, slurries of face-melting rhythms.
Now “Platoon” is Magic Lantern’s most recent 12” following a series of cassette and limited pressings and displays a stoic maturation. Prior releases ran the stylistic gamut from dub, prog, Kosmiche-pastiche, drone, and various other elements on a song-by-song basis. Here however, Magic Lantern fuses, successfully in most instances, varying elements within each song’s loose borders. For example, in lieu of an arguably unbridled jam out on “At the Mountain of Madness” (containing a b-side of Warholian noise art reminiscent at times of Stephen Stapleton’s NWW works) the band has honed their compositional craft on “Platoon.” Yet another example of their tighter, new direction, presents itself upon listening to their album “High Beams” followed immediately by “Platoon,” both on Not Not Fun Records, incidentally. On the one hand, “High Beams” varies from sounding like a Can homage on “Vampires in Heat” or older Pelican on “Deathshead Hawkmoth,” while “Platoon” cruises consistently throughout the album with an enticing but violent calm. “Platoon’s” B-side contains two tracks that, together, run a healthy 20 minutes plus. “On The Dime” maintains the solid groove of the album while amping up guitar stabs and organ wizardry. On “On the Dime” Chip Knechtel and Gavin Fort blast their gear, drums and bass respectively, into a sonic flow like a river of mud and sound very much like Mitch Mitchell and Noel Redding doing what they did for James. These are the raw materials that you wished Bristol junglists would use to fashion their own tracks. Finally, while “Friendship’s” guitars now share headspace with eerie horns and what can only be described as some bizarre East-Asian clarion call to things that can result in no good. The track never relents on trying to bury you in the thickness. Here, Magic Lantern sinks deeper into the abyss, oozing sludgy funk. The reverb machine is still cranking overtime but the gears and pistons have been power cleaned and re-lubricated.
This album howls and snarls and creeps clandestinely into your mind. The mayhem inducing chugginess must be what it’s like to wake up in your barn, clothing tattered, only to find out that you have no recollection of last night’s events and that your village has been ransacked by a wolf-monster that dispatches groups of armed townspeople in short order. Yeah, it’s that heavy. Get lost and enjoy.
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