Album Club - Week 130: 28/01/2014: Flower Travellin' Band - Satori (1971)

[Album Club]

Chris (The Grand Wazoo) has chosen this week's album for us to listen to, comment and vote on.
Please enter into the discussion if you wish to vote, and listen to the entire album before commenting.


Flower Travellin' Band - Satori (1971)



Album on Spotify:





Album on YouTube:





The Soundbite:

Earlier today I was trying to describe this album succinctly and I said it's a bit like the bastard son of the first Black Sabbath album and 'Space Ritual', but born in the maternity ward of Fukushima General Hospital.


A Brief History:

It's 1966 and a famous rockin' teen combo from the UK fly to Japan to do some gigs. Yuya Uchida, a local lad who's released a few rockabilly singles but had already realised that this English band were going to change everything so he writes a song which is played by the support act for the gig at the Budokan Hall

The bass guitarist/singer of the headline band said:

There was a funny local group on stage before us. This was in the days when the Japanese didn't really know how to do rock'n'roll, although they've now got the hang of it pretty well. They sang a song that went, 'Hello Beatles! Welcome Beatles!' - something pretty naff in rock'n'roll terms, but it was very nice of them to do it. Our show went down quite well.

Yuya Uchida flies off to Europe to spend some time immersing himself in the new music scene in London and other cities. He's profoundly influenced by some of the bands that he experiences. Our man Yuya is shocked and amazed by what he hears and trundles back home after a while with a plan to form his own band so he can produce an album to introduce his fellow countrymen to some of the music that had such a profound effect on him.

The music he records (acting mainly as producer) is mostly covers of Cream, Hendrix, The Airplane, Janis..... It's released under the title of 'Challenge' by Yuya Uchida and the Flowers. The first challenge to ultra conservative Japanese society is that the album cover has a photo of the band standing around naked in a meadow!

The next album, 'Anywhere' is recorded by a mostly new band, with a mostly new name - Flower Travellin' Band. As before, it's also a covers record with a sleeve photo of naked band members - only this time they're roaring out of the meadow on motorbikes. The music has become rather more aggressive too - a long way from the pastoral hippy scene portrayed on the sleeve of the first album - much darker and moodier. And heavy....very heavy. The covers include a version of the track 'Black Sabbath' and an astonishing version of '21st Century Schizoid Man'. They are a clue to the sound of the other music that the band were working on at the same time, for what will be their third album - 'Satori' the first to contain all original material.


Why You Should Play It:

When I first heard 'Satori' I realised it's an album unlike any I'd ever heard. You can hear the Black Sabbath influence - that runs right through the very centre of the whole album, but there is also a raga-like Indian theme. The band had now become reduced to a trio of musicians and the sound is stripped down - no keyboards and the drumming is sparser but much, much more forceful. Yuya's musical contribution is reduced to playing a little 'lead tambourine'(!) This leaner arrangement accentuates what's going on with the remarkable guitar playing from Hideki Ishima. The tracks don't have names as such - just 'Satori, Part 1','2','3','4' and '5' and it's not exactly bursting with profoundly poetic lyrics but I love the guitar sounds and the jamming around a theme and just the fact that it's different. If you like a big meaty riff, then this album may be just what you're looking for. People who've discovered it rave about it and tell anyone who'll listen, however, some people just don't get it and dismiss it as noisy, repetitive and derivative, but I feel that's a rather superficial conclusion, because, if you reach into it, you'll find quite a lot of variety, should you make the effort to look for it. Also, given the time and place it was recorded, it was anything but derivative.

If you look around the web, you'll find plenty of people with such good things to say about Satori that you have to wonder why it's not more well known in the West.


The Reviews:

Allmusic:

From power chords to Eastern-tinged, North African, six-string freakouts, to crashing tom toms, to basses blasting into the red zone, Satori is a journey to the center of someplace that seems familiar but has never before been visited. It is a new sonic universe constructed from cast-off elements of the popular culture of the LSD generation. Forget everything you know about hard rock from the 1970s until you've put this one through your headphones. It's monolithic, expansive, flipped to wig city, and full of a beach blanket bong-out muscularity. In other words, this is a "real" classic and worth any price you happen to pay for it.

In the Wake of Poseidon (blog)

The record is druggy and epic with riffs that could end any stoner metal head's life......... "Satori, Pt. 1" is a triumphant blast of sludging riffage with howling moans care of Akira "Joe" Yamanaka. He is Japans answer to Robert Plant. When Yamanaka screams at the beginning of the song, you are sent into a destructive riff that starts slow and then picks up the pace. It is structured much like anything off of Black Sabbath's self titled record.

The Guardian Musicblog

Satori was – and still is – a remarkable album; heavier than a bull elephant's work boot, but still startlingly inventive, it blends edge-of-your-seat psychedelic shamanism with hair-shaking proto-metal rifferama. Ishima is a staggeringly good guitarist – Satori's separate parts are built on his scorchingly bright lead and thunderous crunch, while Joe Yamanaka's three-octave voice threatens – more than once – to boil the liquid on your eyeballs as it sails, somewhere beyond full-tilt, past your terrified earlobes and out into the ether.

Probably the biggest champion of the album in recent years is Julian Cope, who wrote an excellent book called 'Japrocksampler'. At the end, he lists his Top 50 Japrock albums, at the top of which, resides 'Satori'. His final few words sum it up:

The sound was sensational and the playing superb, high above the Japanese standard of the day and infinitely beyond Flowers' feet-of-clay labelmates Speed, Glue & Shinki. Indeed, so out on a limb was Satori that it still defies comparison with other records. They just haven't really been recorded yet.

Conclusion:

I hope at least some of you will enjoy it. It's going to be a very split vote I think, but love it or hate it, you can't deny it's uniqueness, especially for the time it was recorded.