Praise for Les Rallizes Denudes‘ Blind Baby Has It’s Mothers Eyes and Heavier Than A Death In The Family from San Francisco’s aQuarius Records:  All right, time to crank the stereo! There’s no way to listen to these, but loud. Two rather crucial entries in the distorto-delic discography of seminal ’70s Japanese underground rock band Les Rallizes Denudes are now reissued, on proper compact disc for what we think is the very first time, these having being previously only “available”, if you can call it that, as CD-RS.

Blind Baby Has It’s Mothers Eyes, and Heavier Than A Death In The Family, woah, you know with titles like that they’ve gotta be good. And before you go running to your Japrocksamplers to look ‘em up, we’ll save you the trouble: Julian Cope rated these two albums at #11 and #3, respectively, on his top 50 of Japanese psych artifacts. Deservedly so.

Heavily mythologized and mysterious, this lo-fi, in-the-red, sunglasses-wearing, Motown-loving, airplane-hijacking (??!), studio-recording-avoiding, raw outsider rock and roll unit provided the inspiration for every latter day underground Japanese psych band who have ever slipped on shades, cranked up their amps, and had a Tokyo Flashback. (Like Fushitsusha!) And these two discs, both equally recommended, are essential documents as to how and why.

Heavier Than A Death In The Family features six songs, all but one of ‘em in the double digits, with some great titles, no less than three of ‘em referencing the night in some form or other: ‘Strung Out Deeper Than The Night’, ‘The Night Collectors’, ‘Night Of The Assassins’, ‘Enter The Mirror’, ‘People Can Choose’, and ‘Ice Fire’. All were apparently recorded live in ’77 (except one from ’73). Blistering is the word.
Super echoey, reverbed out, almost like Ariel Pink producing Wooden Shjips or Comets On Fire gone dub… Sounds also like some Siltbreeze shitgazers, or current psychsters like Heavy Winged, plodding and throbbing. And “Ice Fire” is 16 minutes of proto-Merzbow meets Hawkwind howl. Wow.

Frayed and fried, ULTRA fuzzed and feedback-y, of course, and yet for a Rallizes release, the sound isn’t all that “bad”, compared to some of their stuff we’ve heard wherein the tape hiss competes with the guitar for domination. Not that that’s a bad thing, either, but this will take less getting used to.

Meanwhile, Blind Baby Has It’s [sic] Mothers [sic] Eyes consists of three tracks, but clocks in at 54 minutes total: the title track, ‘An Awful Eternity’ (aka ‘An Aweful Eternitie’), and ‘The Last One’. Presumably also recorded live, we don’t know when, sometime in the ’70s, the sound here is similar sickness. More of their charismatically clangorous chaos, getting quite hypnotically repetitious across the lengths of these three wandering, wah-wah wailing epics. We’d recommend this as a good gift for your friend who likes the Velvet Underground’s Sister Ray, Circle, and primitive black metal such as Striborg… if they haven’t heard Les Rallizes yet they’ll be thanking you!

Although due to the confusing nature of the Rallizes catalog, we imagine that some of these tracks might appear on other Rallizes discs that you may or may not have, but in any case these two albums are essentials in their entirety. Get ‘em while they last.

At 40 years old, Aquarius is the oldest independent record store in San Francisco. We try to only carry music we love, and we’re always searching for more new, cool, weird and wonderful music. All of which we then share with you, our loyal customers.