Beaches & Canyons

Here is an album for which new adjectives need to be invented. Unfortunately, George Orwell isn't available. Black Dice's Beaches & Canyons is like Robert Fripp getting jiggy with Charles Manson . . . in a huge vat of hydrochloric acid. But even that analogy suggests way too much cohesion to characterize this hour-long aural onslaught. Fact is, there isn't any. This is sonic anarchy—too interesting and too thought-provoking to cast aside: five long tracks of electronic bleeps and blurps, echoes, loops, and walls of feedback that just might drive you half crazy. And that may be the point: four musicians disrupting the disrupted inner man and gunning down all paradigms. There is hardly a vocal to be found, apart from a few incoherent chants and monkey rants. And yet Beaches probably reflects the world better than anything Springsteen has done. But can you handle the truth? This isn't "thinking outside the box"—there is no box. Maddening, hallucinatory, challenging, sublime, unfathomable. Do not adjust your set.—AZ