Customer Reviews

Shall Noise Upon (2LPs w/bonus CD) [Vinyl]

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The Apollo Sunshine have always dabbled in Elephant 6-style psychedelica and sparkling pop melodies, but they've outdone themselves with "Shall Noise Upon."

In particular, their third full-length album is a concept album about spirituality's effect, so they have plenty of material to build on. But they wrap it in a canvas of outrageously loopy sound -- we've got a mishmash of jazz, soul, psychedelic pop and pastoral folk, and it's all splattered with an experimental edge that practically tears off the ear.

"The surface of streams/the fingers of trees/the sweet harmonies/in the breeze...." Sam Cohen sings over a pendulous melody of guitar, rippling harp and trickling piano. As a warmup, he continues singing the praises of nature, and describing it as being "the way I long to touch you."

It's followed by the bouncy acoustic folk of "Singing To The Earth (To Thank Her For You)," the blistering psychedelica of "666: The Coming Of The New World Government," and an all-too brief titular interlude which is basically blips, creaks, and eruptions of electric guitar that sounds like it's trying to possess you. Think a hard-rock reincarnation of the Olivia Tremor Control.

From there they drift through songs in that vein -- delicate folk-pop melodies, countryish ballads, bouncy psychpop, quirky acid-jazzy songs, and a Mexican flavoured pop tune. But there are also songs that go way, way over to the weird side -- warbling strings filled with hymnlike vocals, spacey psychedelic Hawaiian folk.

And there's the eerie "Light Of The World" finale. It's all thunder, strings and dawnlike buildup... followed by silence... and finally finishing with a weird lo-fi brainwashing message. Don't know what that's all about.

"Shall Noise Upon" was apparently recorded in a "house inhabited by spirits" in the Catskills mountains, and there are moments where you can believe that a few of those spirits wangled into a microphone. Then again, there are moments that suggest it was recorded in a beach-house after a sunset party, where somebody was impaled in an electric guitar. Who knows?

Either way, the Apollo Sunshine manages to have it both ways in this album -- they continue to deliver ripe psychedelic pop, but also polish their wild weird experimental eruptions. Lots of acoustic and electric guitars, violin, banjo, brassy trumpets, piano and harp, but also trickling keyboard, explosions of steel guitar, bells and a delicate flute. And they're able to twist normal instrumentation into strange unpredictable shapes, be it an exquisite swell of strings or a hallucinatory burping eruption of screeching guitar.

Sam Cohen rides these songs out to the end, usually sounding like a long-lost Beatle, but channelling Lou Reed occasionally. And he's all too happy to wallow in the lyrics of pastoral love odes and daydreams of a money-free world ("I know I would lose my job/and I would find the time/to do all those things/I've always wanted to do but never had the money..."). At best it's thought-provoking, at worst vaguely incomprehensible and a bit cliched.

"Shall Noise Upon" polishes everything about the Apollo Sunshine, and takes their wild experimental psychedelica and endearing folkpop further into the stratosphere. Change is coming!

I have been a fan of Apollo Sunshine since it's conception.I loved "Conscious Pilot" from the KATONAH album and "YOU AND I" from the PINK album, but this new CD "SHALL NOISE UPON" exceeds all my expectations! This is a musician's mecca and a listener's jewel. The more you listen the more you "get it"!

Apollo Sunshine blends '60s psychedelic folk with the arena rock hugeness of the '70s and the lo-fi noise pop aesthetics of '90s groups like My Bloody Valentine or the Olivia Tremor Control.

The cover art for the Boston, Mass.-based trio's third record, Shall Noise Upon, depicts a Jackson Pollock-like, color-splattered globe surrounded by constellations of religious and spiritual icons from every corner of the earth. The image suggests the record somehow takes the disparate cultures of a large world and unifies them into a single, genre-breaking, stargazing album. It may seem like an impossibly lofty goal, but the songs deliver.

The LP w/bonus CD is also a big plus as you get the beauty of the LP art and the warmth of the music on vinyl, with a CD version of the album that you can pop in your car stereo or rip onto your iPod.

I've listened to this album with great enjoyment and awe. Though I delight in all the tracks, I'm unable to get my mind around the whole. Each track is uniquely different from the others, and all offer a listening experience that leaves my senses amazed. The group has mastery over their medium to such a degree that this listener is awestruck with wonder at their virtuosity and sound. From the raucous "666" through the melodic "Happiness" to the irresistible hook of "Mermaid Angeline", the album soars over all musical genres.

This is creative achievement that readily attains greatness. So bottomless in nuance, it will both delight and challenge your being for years. Failure to purchase it will be your own great loss.

Shall Noise Upon (2008, Headless Heroes) Apollo Sunshine's third studio album. ****

I would recommend that everyone listen to this album at least once, especially if you enjoy late 60's psychedelia. No doubt you'll find at least one song you like, because every song sounds like a different band; early Pink Floyd, Cream, the Beatles, the Byrds, etcetera. And while most of the album is fairly captivating, Shall Noise Upon fails to act as a coherent piece. Nothing is really put together, it's like having a puzzle where all the pieces are the same color, making it impossible to figure out how to shape it into one thing.

"Singing to the Earth" moves like George Harrison's work, bouncy and full of sunshine. "666" mixes Aorta with Floyd, reeking of fairly impressive guitar distortion imitation. The beginning of "Happiness" is almost identical to "I Talk to the Wind" by King Crimson. All of this isn't necessarily bad, the music sounds great; but there really isn't a voice to be found anywhere. Shall Noise Upon, then, acts less as art (though it seems Apollo Sunshine meant it that way) and more as pure entertainment for stoners who miss or would have wanted to be a part of Woodstock. I don't scold that. Because even though they do sound like other bands from the era, they're not ripping off anyone's work. I enjoyed it thoroughly, and I highly recommend it to anyone who is a friend of the hookah. (Singing to the Earth, The Funky Chamberlain, Money)

You won't be sorry. This is a great album. It's a slight departure from their other stuff, but it's just as brilliant. Great album by a great band!

I bought this on vinyl the last time I saw Apollo Sunshine play. That was in August of 2008. One year later, I think I'm starting to get it. Admittedly, my expectations were so high when I bought this album that it would have been almost impossible to live up to them. I have been a huge fan of the band since first seeing them in 2005, and they're the only band I've gone back to see, say, 6 or 7 times. Needless to say, I really wanted to love this album. I didn't. It felt claustrophobic, overly-ambitious, and utterly unfocused. Sure there were a few truly amazing songs, an overall "trippy" and "experimental" vibe (late 60s psychedelia blah blah blah), and some mindblowing cover art, but it felt disturbingly lacking as a whole.

A year after the fact, I am finally warming up to it, finally starting to feel the magic that I felt listening to Katonah and their self-titled over the years--somewhat obsessively at times. Shall Noise Upon is a very challenging album. It's almost as if they set out to intentionally distract and turn away anyone without an absurd level of dedication. It's not enough to call it "schizophrenic"... it's more like it suffers from a whole host of "mental disorders" and thus has taken a whole lot of effort to see the unadulterated beauty underneath all the strange and distracting layers. It is bi-polar, schizophrenic, prone to ADHD, with a little multiple personality disorder to boot. What really makes it complicated is that most individual songs are this way, as well as the album as a whole. Although a shock to the system at first, multiple listens (and multiple might just mean 10 or 15, for starters) are necessary. Or maybe all it takes is the right place and the right time. Either way, underneath all the arguable hubris, this is starting to finally strike me as a thing of beauty... dare I say almost a cohesive album. Almost...

I almost wrote it off for good, and I'm glad I didn't. As if Sam, Jesse, and Jeremy could ever let me down! Aww shucks. If nothing else, a whoooole lot of work obviously went into this. A true labor of love, like their overall existence as a band. A little patience and dedication goes a long way. In another few months, it just might climb its way up to five star status.

I had read a review of this album in Bass Player magazine that made it sound like a creative album with a fantastic variety of groovin' music. The reviews that I read on Amazon seemed to back that up. What I heard was a bland, intentionally lo-fi album of semi-trippy music with Beatles like vocals. Most of those elements could have led to something tasty if the tunes had more drive to them, but it sounded more like an album to nod off to. Fortunately the cover is about fifty times cooler than the music, and I will consider the money I paid a decent investment on the visual art to add to the collection of covers on my studio wall!

I'd been a fan of Apollo Sunshine since I saw them in concert in 2004, and spent the entire week listening to "Katonah." Yes, it was messy, but it was also inspired, and incredibly catchy. Their self-titled follow-up was a remarkable step-up from "Katonah," and I was expecting great things from "Shall Noise Upon."

Unfortunately, "Shall Noise Upon" left me wanting. I was so unhappy with the music, that I almost stopped listening to it after just one round. I forced myself to listen a few more times, just to make sure, but my mind wasn't changed.

Sure, there are a few gems: "666" is an excellent romp, Happiness is a surreal masterpiece, and Money is a classic throwback. But the rest of the album feels like it doesn't fit: some tracks are static and boring, because they never develop. Other tracks are annoying right from start to finish because they have far too many filter effects obscuring the actual music ("The Funky Chamberlain" and "Brotherhood of Death" are particularly bad).

In the end, the album feels like more of a mess than "Katonah," and without the inspired feel.