Review Summary: A riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.
The schizoid rear-window ravings of a madman. The crash of grass cannons firing in salute of a new day. To float on a cloud of thought itself. How do you even begin to discuss an album like Black Foliage: Animation Music Vol. 1？By all reasonable measures its sheer density should render it impenetrable, but if you give yourself over to its wild, gnarled roots you will find a record eager to share its unique brand of madness.
Its influences are a fair place to start - being the clearest element displayed on this technicolor mammoth of a double LP. To say that The Olivia Tremor Control take queues from The Beatles and The Beach Boys would be an understatement - their classic psychedelic pop fingerprints are all over Black Foliage, from its multi-part vocal harmonies & guitar driven melodies to that vintage 4-track production. Yes, this record is dripping in guitar driven psych pop sunshine, but this is no re-hash, and this band has no intentions of merely reproducing that sound. No, this is something else entirely.
As devotees of the school of Sgt. Pepper the Olivia Tremor Control not only grasp the impetus and multi-dimensionality of the classics, but, miraculously, push the sound forward to the psychedelic conclusion that their influences could never quite reach on their own. The struggle that The Beatles and The Beach Boys always grappled with was the bipolarity of their brilliance; their masterful crafting of catchy pop hooks on one end of the spectrum & their wild experimentation on the other. On The White Album you get the melodious Dear Prudence on side A and the cacophonous Revolution No. 9 on side B; demonstrating the two, seemingly irreconcilable aspects of their sound - how could it be any other way ？
You see, as great as Lennon, McCartney, and Wilson were, they always seemed to be stuck on the cusp of a revelation; of uncovering a musical singularity where all the disparate pieces coalesce into a brilliant whole. The pieces were all there: the colorful harmonies & unorthodox instrumentation, the mind-expanding tangents & the tight guitar-driven pop structure. It was assumed an impossible task to assemble such a wide variety of inherently mis-matching pieces, but this is precisely what Black Foliage accomplishes.
As much a result of drug induced revelation as it is discipline and rigor Black Foliage is nothing short of a triumph in the realm of psychedelic rock. Unlike its predecessors, which separated their pop-friendly sound from their discordant experimentation, The Olivia Tremor Control envelops each harmony with experimental elements - ensuring that each wobble, each twist, and each revelatory quirk & riff fits into the pop songcraft like perfect puzzle pieces. Each aspect of their sound relies on the other - the sweet harmonies are given character by wild twists and turns, which are themselves brought directly to the forefront by the hooks they latch onto.
For 69 minutes the band keeps you suspended in this world they've rendered in discord and harmony until you can no longer distinguish the two and they coalesce into a monolithic whole of a hundred thousand vibrant colors viewed from a million different angles at once. By pushing past the delirium and haze that serves as the common end point for records of its genre Black Foliage breaks the boundaries of psychedelic rock, irreparably warping and expanding your aural synapses in the process.
If this sounds like a lot to take in, its because that it is. The band is uncompromising in its approach, never burying its pop brilliance or psychedelic madness despite the colossal density of the album. The resulting 27 tracks, ranging from 5 seconds to 11 minutes in length, technically qualify as pop but will come across as something far more intimidating to the uninitiated. Infectiously off kilter and maddeningly ambitious Black Foliage isn't an easy listen, although it IS an inviting one. One that gives every listener all the tools they need to piece together its brilliance. Just don't expect to understand the full breadth of the work on the first, fifth, or even fiftieth listen. Even the album's lyricism seems to be conscious of its impenetrable character:
"I have been floated to a thought this hour..."
"To a series of events...I cannot explain..."
But the truth is out there - a glimmering whisper under the warm Georgian sun. So please, I encourage you to give yourself over to the madness, because what we have here is an album that is essential to any burgeoning audiophile. An album with which any listener can give themselves an aural workout, rewire their auditory synapses, and strengthen their musical literacy. An album strong enough to change the way you listen to music.
