4 out of 5

Label: DIscos Mascarpone

Produced by: Avelino Saavedra (recorded by)

Patience is a virtue, which maybe is hard to say about a guitar / drums noise freakout band who blasts your ears with improvised shredding on opener ‘Acid For Hegel,’ but: across M.A.F.H.’s 8-song debut of similarly expansive instrumentals – think Mats Gustaffson translated to guitar or Flower-Corsano on permanent uppers – I kept waiting for the album, or even for any given song, to really settle into… something. With improv, there’s a certain tolerance for bloat, as the players find their way to an ebb and flow, but that’s exactly it: I wasn’t able to detect ebb or flow. It felt like A.L. Guillén and Avelino Saavedra – M.A.F.H. – were just on, and then you’re in it with them. Or not. And after a couple tracks of that, maybe I was not.

However, the closing title track suddenly gave me what I wanted: after jamming out madly for a good chunk of its 8-minutes, the duo starts hitting some breakdowns, which gives us a moment of pause for the track to ramp back up for a damned intense conclusion. So – I hit play again with a bit more… patience for the project as a whole.

Indeed, with a bit of a grander take, More Acid proves to be a pretty rounded experience: if you take in the songs as the ebb and flow, and consume all the anarchy as existing within a single puzzle piece – that is, despite all the chaos, its intention is to achieve a singular emotional note – then there’s actually quite a bit of variation here, stretching from freakouts to ambience and minimalism, landing on some comparatively “linear” “rock” in the album’s conclusion.

Is all of that necessary? It’s hard to parse that; I do think it can be a bit of a march until the duo starts allowing themselves to lay down some borders, making me wonder if this thing could’ve held my attention from the outset if there were hints of that early on. However, that same battle definitely makes “getting it” incredibly rewarding.