Old Time Relijun possesses a unique brand of down-home insanity, expressed through nightmarish imagery and ramshackle intensity. On their eighth album(!), Catharsis in Crisis, the Portland-by-way-of-Olympia band pump Birthday Party blood through a bleating Beefheart (fittingly, they’re named after a song from Trout Mask Replica) and continue to channel The Pop Group, if they had grown up and recorded in a junkyard.
“Indestructible Life!” introduces the group’s name, as well as their off-kilter esthetic. If you're new to the group, this is a primitive stream of elastic guitars, skronking sax and clarinet, throbbing upright bass, skeletal yet somehow massive-sounding drums and hollered, monotone vocals, as if heard through a megaphone.
“Daemon Meeting” is another early highlight, with its simple repeating guitar line and singer Arrington de Dionyso’s manic chants of “what does it mean to be human?” “Dark Matter” is a vaguely surf-sounding rocker with three and a half minutes of instrumental introduction, including some of the tightest percussion-pummeling on the record. “Veleno Mortale,” though, is both the album’s longest song and its standout track. Here, OTR toss some piano and xylophone into their witches’ brew, along with some especially fiery foreign-language incantations.
It’s hard to imagine real, live humans making this mesmerizing racket, and though this hairy four-piece has a MySpace page, an act like Old Time Relijun would probably have seemed more exciting and mysterious in an era of less accessible information. At least the music is still darkly magical enough.
