Delay Tactics make music that stretches cosmic sonics and cavorts dance steps that mirror the strange life forms that may or may not exist in the watery depths of Saturn’s big moon, Titan.
This is authentic American progressive music as it dances like Carl Jung’s archetypal philosophical privative pulse. Brian Eno, Robert Fripp and Peter Gabriel touched this very same burning bush live battery fire. This music moves ritualistic stones around sacred musical cairns.
A bit of history: Delay Tactics was formed in 1981, with Carl Weingarten and Reed Nesbit as “a tape-looping duo.” Keyboardist Walter Whitney joined for their first album, Out-Pop Options. Later, guitarist David Udell replaced Nesbit as the band recorded their second album, Any Questions? in 1984. Both records can be summed with the words of Eno, as he sang, “Baby’s on fire.”
So, thank you to Multiphase Records for this re-mastered two-disc collection (from the original analog tapes!) with 10 bonus tracks of unreleased studio and live material. To push the jigsaw together, it’s important to mention the band’s third album, Elements of Surprise, which also has a “Fire Ceremony” of its delight.
Despite the “tape looping” and “minimalism” tags, Out-Pop Options is great rock music. Any devotee of Robert Fripp, circa Discipline-era King Crimson, his League of Gentlemen album, and Barry Andrews’ Shriekback will enjoy this alternative serpent’s Eden seduction.
Thankfully (to mention another mythic metaphor), Tantalus finally gets a taste: The first track, “Yellow Samba,” pulses with a bubbling Eastern vibe. The great Jade Warrior comes to mind. Ditto for the “Dark River” journey of “Fire Quest.” Big compliment. Mystery oozes from an ancient broth.
“This Time” babbles in a cauldron with weird voices and then merges into “Five PM Expressway,” which not only sends out to “Call Any Vegetable,” but phones in a few garden delights from an alternative universe. The funk quotient expands with “On the Roll,” with a bass bulging like a great tune from the band A Certain Ration.
Seriously, “Le Neud de Viperes” extends Fripp’s brief Lizard-era “Prince Rupert’s Lament” solo into a guitar soliloquy that bleeds with the continued girthed carnage of humanity’s “glass tears.”
“Chasing Moroder” is an “Out-Pop” sci-fi travelogue that is “On the Run” through any color in the spectrum you may care to like. The brilliant “Basic Tactic” saws through a celestial mystery, with a razored halo. Then the song “Departure” evokes a bit of Tony Banks and Steve Hackett. This is great prog music that survived the big punk asteroid of 1977.
The Out-Pop Options disc ends with four bonus tracks. The 12-minute plus “Initial Opus” slows the universe and spirals salvation with deep melodic gravity. Then it throbs with the weight of Galileo’s knowledgeable sinful tombstone words, “Eppur si muove” (“and yet it moves”). This baby is still on fire.
The band’s second album Any Questions? followed in 1984, with Udell replacing the departed Reed Nesbit. Sure, this is techno-pop, but it’s dealt with progressive rock-playing cards by an adventurous human hand that doesn’t adhere to the ’70s-styled Close to the Edge British template.
The cosmic trampoline continues. “Pterodactyl” bounces and dances (even when fossilized!), while whipping a demonic wingspan of an electric guitar wah-wah solo. “Hands of Fire” worships any bonfire’s sparked electricity. Ditto for “Oysters” and as my friend Kilda Defnut, said: “This is wonderfully weird music that would be an instructional video for Arthur Murray – if he were given a much more cosmic dancefloor, with big gravitational humor.” As always, thank you, Kilda!
That said, there’s more sonic color. “On Green Waters” wobbles with an interesting take on the looped Frippertronics sound. “Almost Touching” again conjures the melodic keyboards of Tony Banks. Then the six-minute “Kites” pops out with a huge glance (and delightful bass!) at the serenity of the stars. “Under the Ice” sparkles, as “Trio” growls an introduction to “Spring Man,” which is yet another dance-floor pulse with more of its share of that gravitational humor. The album proper ends with the acoustic guitar and haloed keyboard requiem, “Departure.”
Any Questions? is bolstered with six bonus tracks, all of which replay and add to the weird sonic ballet of the original record, which ties brain synapses into knots that are yet to be described in the Boy Scout Manual of Conventional Music.
There are Out-Pop Options that answer Any Questions in these primitive grooves here – cool grooves that have both (to quote the great Procul Harum!) “skipped the light fandango” and have been able to “turn cartwheels ’cross the floor,” with future melodies, all the while, just being out for the evening on a whimsical (and quite peculiar!) cosmic date.
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