Ozric Tentacles: The Hidden Step
Ozric Tentacles, one of the leading bands of the British free festival scene had often received criticisms that all their albums sound alike. Well, that’s not entirely true, they do evolve, but their sound, for the most part, is quite recognizable from album to album.
The Hidden Step, released in 2000, is another excellent installment in the Ozrics catalog. To me, this is quite an improvement over their previous offering, Waterfall Cities (1999), as this is more powerful and easier to get in to. The album is also more guitar oriented as well. While the ugly computer generated artwork on the CD cover might turn some people away (just isn’t the same when Blim isn’t there doing that cool psychedelic artwork for their CDs), I am glad to still see the Ozrics sticking true to their space rock sound.
The album opens with a couple of great rockers, “Holohedron” and the title track. The title track is perhaps the most interesting is it goes through several different changes. My favorite is the middle and end part, the middle part is the band going in overdrive with totally insane guitar work from Ed, and synth work from Seaweed, while the end part features some truly great spacy synth work, reminding me of one of the Ozrics earlier works: Arborescence (1994).
There’s a couple of rather exotic Middle Eastern sounding numbers, “Aramanu” and “Aschlandi Bol” which reminds me a lot of Erpland (1990). “Pixel Dream” is a wonderful guitar-oriented number that gives me a reminder of their early, cassette-era releases, only with better production, of course. “Tight Spin” is a techno number that sounds a lot like Eat Static (which was a techno outfit that featured former Ozric members Joie and Merv).
The last one, “Ta Khut” is basically an ambient number with a strong Egyptian feel to it. Not my favorite, as it sounds too close to New Age for my liking, not to mention, the synthesizer being used sounds too digital. Regardless, if you are an Ozric Tentacles fan, this CD is another worthy release from these guys.