ALBUM REVIEW: Top Ten Zen Meditations – Locean

Dissonant, slippery and brittle, LOCEAN‘s Top Ten Zen Meditations is nothing if not confounding. This isn’t music to chill to, to have on as you’re driving to work or cooking dinner. This is music that requires your full care and attention, much like the meditations of its title. The Manchester collective’s newest work of noise rock psychedelia is as experimentally free as anything they’ve recorded thus far, consisting of eight improvised tracks that traverse the outer limits of noise, post-punk, free jazz, krautrock, no wave and every other weird and niche corner of band-driven music you care to imagine.

The album is split into two halves, recorded by two (mostly) different sets of musicians. The first half is more expansive, featuring a cavernous production style and heightened sense of tension, giving its four tracks a real creeping intensity. Clicking Fingers is a harrowing delight, featuring stabs of distorted bass and a skeletal drum pattern that gently wraps its fingers around your throat.

Sprruce Bingstein is built around free jazz-inspired chaos and an especially dissonant second half that descends into harsh, apocalyptic noise. These tracks are all brilliantly performed, with their highlights coming from the ambitious vocal work of Lauren Bolger. Ranging from a Kim Gordon-like laconic drawl on Coca Cola to unhinged screams on Sprruce Bingstein, she expertly follows the wild anarchy of the music through its varying flights of fancy.

The second half Top Ten Zen Meditations differs in its style of production, though is musically no less bold and experimental. Bolger’s vocals are no longer as prominent, merging into the soundscapes instead of howling out from within them. The guitars sound a little more conventional here, however are used much more frantically. On Forever Zen and Looking For Melody they almost never stop, giving the songs a paranoid quality, like they’re desperately in search of something. Though these tracks are more dense than the former four, they do lose some of the intensity. Officer makes for a nice change of pace, using its Slint-like compactness to crawl its way into your head, but mostly, this back four doesn’t quite land with the same force as the first half does.

A genuinely odd album, Top Ten Zen Meditations’s improvisational chaos walks a fine line between the sublime and the ridiculous. There are moments where you find yourself completely in step with its anxious rhythms and dark power, but also a few others where you start to feel like the musicians are having more fun creating it than you listening to it. The former impression generally outweighs the latter though, and makes Top Ten Zen Meditations more than worth a listen, providing you have an open-mind and a willingness to meet LOCEAN at least half of the way.

Rating: 7/10

Top Ten Zen Meditations is out now via Artificial Head Records.

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