Death Comes Along

During the 1990s, the most bizarre re-interpretation of 1970s space-rock was perhaps produced by Japan's gothic punks Death Comes Along in the two jams of Heavy Psychedelic Schizoid God (Mangrove, 1994). Death Comes Along Part is 18 minutes of haywire, disorderly jamming followed by nine minutes of pure senseless noise. Heavy Psychedelic Schizoid God, which opens with military band music, descends into ultra-aberrant jamming for eight minutes before rising in a heavy jam that mixes Black Sabbath and Jimi Hendrix.

After a long hiatus, they resurfaced with Psychedelic Inferno (2001). The 14-minute Psychedelic Inferno is truly an infernal version of the Taj Mahal Travellers, a concentrate of screams, guitar distortion, electronic noise and erratic drumming. It flows into the satanic voodoobilly Death Death Death, manically spewing abrasive guitar grit all over the place. Psychedelic Inferno 2 is devoted to abstract electronic soundpainting with the stubborn relentless manic imagination of a child. Psychedelic Inferno 3 is a wordless chant over scant and erratic jamming, high grade freak-folk.