There was a brief time when Hibushibire could have been thought of as Acid Mothers Temple’s Kansai counterparts, a gang of like-minded psychedelic voyagers with a shared love of expansive cosmic jams, freakout guitar explosions and driving garage rock who just so happened to have found themselves on Acid Mothers Temple’s UK home-from-home Riot Season, but it didn’t take them long for them to establish themselves as a wholly unique force. They accomplished this partly through their stellar live reputation, as anyone who caught them on their recent European tour will testify, but also on the consistency of their studio output, each release building on the energy of its predecessor while throwing a new concoction of rare and funky ingredients into the mix to see what bubbles up to the surface.
Phantom Fuzzy Exotica, their fifth full-length to date, feels like their most complete and fully realised album yet. It’s cut from the same cloth as everything that has come before, from changchang’s ecstatic and endlessly creative guitarwork, constantly shifting gears between driving garage rhythms and searing bursts of fret-worrying abandon, to Tetsuji Toyoda’s insistent bass that give the record a timeless quality, a modern-day counterpart to the mighty Jun Kobayashi’s balance of grit and groove; the big departure is how they have managed to use these elements to paint scenes that feel fresh and untried, a naiveite in their approach of taking a theme and running with it for no other reason than to see where they end up.
‘Minagoroshi Western’ adds a touch of desperado spirit, changchang’s jangling melodies bright and tense, slowly climbing in urgency with each dizzying loop until it feels like the whole band are locked in a four-way Mexican standoff, the energy crackling and fizzing until it eventually collapses in on itself; on the other hand, ‘Daydream Rendezvous’ might be one of their most laid-back songs ever, a haze of summery psych that drifts through the album’s middle with all the urgency of a floating cloud, with Aoi Hama’s playful fills holding the whole thing together until a bluesy lead break from Changchang brings it softly back down to earth.
Most ambitious, though, is their take on ‘Ai Vist Lo Lop’, a medieval Occitan composition given their own heady twist. At first it keeps largely true to its pastoral roots, a haunting vocal rendition that brings to mind golden fields and blazing wicker men, but as the distortion kicks in it explodes into colour, dancing and weaving with the crackling energy of a bonfire. It remains the same composition but shifted into a higher plane of existence, flaming out under its own relentless momentum. In a sense, this is Hibushibire’s final form, the collision of spirituality, psych and rock’n’roll they had been building towards since Freakout Orgasm! first blew minds and melted faces. There is no such thing as a throwaway album from this bunch – every one has its own impish charm – but if you are looking for somewhere to start, kick off with this… and then hunt down the rest, see them live, and buy the t-shirt.
