Up-Tight - "Live At the Lucrezia" DVD
(Last Visible Dog Records LVDDVD-126, All Regions/PAL/NTSC 2009)
Up-Tight - "Live At the Lucrezia" DVD
(Last Visible Dog Records LVDDVD-126, All Regions/PAL/NTSC 2009)
From Aural Innovations April 2010 update
Up-Tight are Tomoyuki Aoki - guit/vocal, Takashi Ogata - bass and Takashi Shirahata - drums. There are four lengthy tracks of slow, heavy, plodding doom-rock that build to crescendos of intense guitar and vocal screech. Recorded in August of 2007, 51:55. I watched the video once and it's the expected classic psych visuals: dim-lighting, some bubbles, strobes, 360's, no surprises. The rhythm section mostly remain in the shadows while Aoki is the cool cig-smokin', shades-wearin' frontman, wailing in native and screaming on guitar... or vice versa... he's quite adept at extracting fierce cosmic destruction from the axe. I'm preferring his agonized climactic screams to the sung verses. "Cool Eyes" remains ballad-ish for most of its duration. A little bit is lost in the closer "Sweet Sister", some of the guitar is sounding off/off-key. (On this go-through, my back is to the screen, only listening now.) All in all, while it'd probably be quite devastating to stand in front of Aoki's amp, even if I had the CD I don't think I'd be drawn back to this recording... it's not much of anything different than what's gone before. Hopefully they can evolve what ability they do have into something to set them apart from the hordes.
Visit the band web site at: http://www.myspace.com/bllpc
Visit the Last Visible Dog Web site at: http://www.lastvisibledog.com
Reviewed by Chuck Rosenberg