Jazkamer - Balls the Size of Texas, Liver the Size of Brazil [Purplesoil - 2007]This really revels in screwing with your perception of it, firstly the title suggest head-ripping noise or staged and cocky rock, This is neither. Secondly with the Jazkamer name attached to it one would expect a real noisy afair, though there are noise elements here that certainly is not the predominate sound strain . What the Norwegian duo present us with is a collection eerie, haunted, ambient and cinematic guitar expanse- with traces of electronics and the odd touches of noise matter and other sound elements here & there. The album starts in a very odd and deliberately frustrating manner with an 8 minute dialogue track of a doctor talking about blood pressure - you keep thinking as the doctor details different forms of blood pressure recordings it’s going to explode, but it never does. Blues For Sterling Hayden is the first musical track building up gloomy guitar loops/ layers, that bring to mind slowly coming awake on a heavy rain winters day. They cleverly building the looped atmosphere adding in little touches of new guitar textures and electronics before by the midway mark drifting into discordant avant rock folds of guitar tone. The album continues in a similar fashion for the rest of it’s running time creating effective and cinematic guitar and ambient scapes ripple with mumbled dialog and minimal electronic textures, theres only one really detour into true noise matter with track five Not half Bad to the Bone. It all builds to the truly haunted and breathtaking emotional 16 minutes title track finale, that echoes out lush and enchanted fold of almost blues come dark county ambience- feeling like watching a eerier but beautiful sunset and the nights cold breath start biting in. An Effective and atmospheric collection of tracks, which really proves there’s much more to this ever evolving duo than simply noise. A must for those who enjoy perfect honed and atmopshric guitar scapes and emtonal ambience. Roger Batty
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