3 out of 5

Label: Maboroshi No Sekai

Produced by: Kido Natsuki, Katsui Yuji

I think I stumbled onto Bondage Fruit by following some threads from Ruins – reading reviews of Tatsuya’s Koenjihyakkei albums, noting down some RIYL…

The line from zeuhl to Bondage Fruit definitely exists, but this earlier release feels more scattershot overall, stepping from Tortoise chill, to folk / jazz improv, and then to, like, Lightning Bolt spazz-rock. Those aren’t wholly mismatched styles, but I’m not sure that Bondage Fruit succeeds in blending them all, and there’s a larger sense of wandering on III Récit than flow, or tension. That wandering is never uninteresting, and variably soothes or rocks, but I can’t say tracks exactly go anywhere; rather, they just exist in different section. Opener Odd-Job, for example, starts with a post-rock strut before some disruptive keys turn it into laid-back bop for a while, at then at some point it jumps into speaker-shattering riffing and pummeling. Those sections don’t lead into one another; they interrupt one another. This is a live track – there are a couple of those – and I imagine physically seeing the group vibe together is quite a site, but it’s lacking that immersion on album.

Kagee Ga Kieru is our easy-listening jazz; Frost and Fire is probably the album’s most focused bit of build and release. The 28-minute title track is certainly notable for that length alone, but despite leaning much more heavily on thrash drums than Odd-Job, it’s conceptually similar: switching over to another style at whatever interval.

Again, to underline: that’s 28-minutes that are never boring, and often quite intense. This is definitely a group I want to listen more to, and III Récit, despite feeling a bit open-ended, does carve out a unique space in the instrumental world for Bondage Fruit, giving the group leeway to go in various directions, each with confidence.