Sounding like an acoustic version of Faust, Black Sheep, Julian Cope new band issued like year the awesome sounding Kiss My Sweet Apocalypse, a matter of an acquired taste, as Julian said, conceptually the record tries to takes us into a prehistoric future, were electricity I not available and we only have drumming and chants (great!)

War ! Peace! Is precisely that, ten minutes of the band shouting those two words to the sound of a martial minimalistic drums, kind of reminds me of those guys on the movies that sang row! row! while rowing to the monotone sound of a drum (yeah, that prehistoric!)

My current fixation with orient makes easy to digest Leila Khaled, a guerrilla fighter from Palestine, whose beautiful young face was transformed by surgery in order to prevent her from been caught, allowing her to continue with her subversive activities, LK is a beautiful piece with Moody Blues-Night In White Satin-like atmospheric keyboards and acoustic guitars, a piece as simple as beautiful, watching the young face of Miss Khaled just gives this little melody more sense.

Kiss My Sweet Apocalypse might be one of those demented jams by John Lennon, Yoko Ono and David Peel were the guys just band their drums and sang anarchic diatribes against the US, mellotron assisted by Cope´s log time collaborators Holy McGrail or Thighpaulsandra, perhaps we are a little bit closer to Tangerine Dream on this one.

Acoustic guitars, tribal and martial drums dominate the record, vocals are sparse, minimal, closer to ancient chanting rather than modern rock singing, Cope puts his persona behind the whole group concept as we have here a Black Seep record and not a Julian Cope record, it’s a beautiful and original recording, definitely out of this world and out of this time sounding, one may be a little bit distracted by the acoustic-mellotron long passages but it never gets boring, or lacking sense, Ernesto (a reference to Ernesto “Che” Guevara) is an amazing acoustical-noise piece that shakes things up, as the band gets crazy strumming guitars, screaming and receiving doses of spiraling synths.

A record not exactly made to appeal head bangers but perhaps Neanderthals, or maybe drunken sailors, who like to bang trance like monotonous rhythms and sing a long as they fall preys of alcohol.

Cope keeps innovating and just as the greatest acts in avant music, like the Velvet Underground, The Stooges, Miles Davis, Lee Perry, Magma or John Coltrane, Cope keeps creating his own universe subjected only to his own laws and logic, it may sound odd, but in Cope´s universe this may all make sense, and it does make sense to me too.