Band:	Muyubyosha
Album:	一期一会
Style:	Avantgarde metal
Release date:	May 25, 2018
A review by:	RaduP

01. Sitting For The Road
02. If Return - A Mirror Glance
03. Never Through A Threshold
04. No Premature Celebrations
05. Never Ailments On Oneself
06. No Clinking Of Glasses

A lot of music is described as nightmarish, but just because it's evil and visceral and foreboding doesn't mean it's nightmarish if it feels too vivid. Muyubyosha aka Sleepwalker make nightmarish music that is actually dreamy. And no, not Deafheaven-ish dreamy.

Both the band and the album title are in Japanese, but the album title roughly translates to For This Time Only, Never Again, and the band name can already be seen. Muyubyosha is pretty out-there. "Avant-garde" gets thrown-out a lot these days, sometimes justified, sometimes not, but Muyubyosha are really hard to pinpoint or to compare to anything else. You're gonna have to hear it to believe it.

While in some ways rooted in atmospheric black metal, the music is so disjointed and cacophonous and the production so hazy, murky, and off-kilter that you're left to wonder what's going on. Taking cues from noise rock to sludge metal to free jazz, the effect is almost always disorienting and terrifying. The bass-heavy live-in-studio-with-overdubs production and the occasional grooves do make the listening a bit more dynamic and engaging in certain sections if you choose to ignore how nauseous everything else is - so whichever few moments do feel like conventional music are there for sure, but scattered and never lasting.

The spooky vocals are more often than not shrieked but at such a low volume that they feel like distant whispers, almost like just another part of the subconscious. They do take center-place from time to time, and when they do, they massively increase the aggression of the music. The relative rarity of those moments does make them more impactful when they come. The instrumentation is quite technical, and its clear that these musicians can hold their own and could write a proper album with proper music if they wanted to, but everybody else is already doing that, and no one is making cacophonous and nauseating music that actually sounds masterfully crafted instead of amateurishly, randomly put together.

The effect of this album is certainly psychedelic in a way. Like a really, really bad trip or that nightmare where you wake up feeling like you fell. And just like that it's over. 23 minutes that certainly feel like they lasted forever. Inland Empire in a pill. Take it here.