Ozric Tentacles (or for short the Ozric’s) have been ploughing their sonic furrow for somewhere around thirty years, surviving many lineup changes, engaging in many different side projects, forming their own label, releasing around 25-30 albums (depending on whose list you believe) and selling over a million albums worldwide. No mean feat in today’s climate.
Yet they’re still an unknown quantity to many music fans, which could be because the Ozric’s ply their trade on the outer edges of that rarified space where prog/psych coexist, with their signature blend of hippie aesthetics, soundscapes created by waves of synths/keys and spiralling guitars having rarely been altered. If you’re not familiar with the Ozric’s, their music consists almost entirely of long, meandering, blissful space rock workouts, with touches of ambient and world music included somewhere in the mix. As main man Ed Wynne (the only original member left) says “This is space music for people on earth to enjoy”.
Lotus Unfolding features six new tunes, which were conceived and recorded in their own Blue Bubble Studios. This being the Ozric’s you know right from the outset there’ll be few surprises in what’s on offer. Not that this is a bad thing .. AC/DC have sustained an almost 40-year career playing largely the same riffs. There’re some quite delightful sounds on this album, with lots of embellishing synth ‘dweedling’ and strong rhythm patterns which take the listener out into the ‘blooposphere’ (Ed Wynne’s term). For this reviewer, the main skillset of the Ozric’s is in their synthesizing of electronic sounds with the traditional sounds of a rock band. A track like ‘Crumplepenny’ is an example, with lots of swirling synths/guitar/drum interplay – all well melded together. Pieces like this could easily sink into just being a morass of sound but the Ozric’s handle all the competing sounds with admirable aplomb. Similarly with the title track ‘Lotus Unfolding,’ is a quite gorgeous piece, with twittering synths and flute intro and a blissful, serene sonic excursion.
But the main issue with any Ozric’s album, however, is while the music and the sound are all beautifully crafted, the individual pieces tend not to stick around in the mind for very long afterwards as actual ‘songs.’ But this doesn’t matter because, onstage, the Ozric’s improvise constantly so, even if you remembered a piece, it’d sound different ‘live’ as they tend to go wherever their muse takes them. The Ozric’s are a classic ‘Marmite’ band but, if you ‘get’ what they attempting to create, there’s a lot here to enjoy.
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