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Bulgogi Juan Dissed the Cyclops Baby Review by Gary Hill I’d bet you’ve not heard anything like this before. In some ways, it’s not far removed from things like Giant Squid or Green Milk from the Planet Orange. Don’t get me wrong, this is strange. I love music that blends seemingly disparate types of music, though. If that doesn’t demonstrate the very spirit of progressive rock, I don’t know what does. This thing is also full of frantic changes. It’s a short album. That’s my biggest complaint. It’s just four tracks that are in the neighborhood of six minutes each. If you have a spirit of adventure as it applies to music, you should check this out. It will live up to the expectation of unpredictability. This review is available in book format (hardcover and paperback) in Music Street Journal: 2016 Volume 4 at lulu.com/strangesound.

Track by Track Review

School This has a great contrast between a strange kind of bouncy mellow segment and some screaming, extreme metal stuff. This is a cool, if unusual track. It’s clearly not for everyone. There is a section later that goes along way toward combining those things. It makes for something that’s really strange prog rock.

Hymn There is a cool jazz meets prog opening bit with almost whispered vocals. Then it fires out to something that has both strange prog and extreme metal built into it. The vocals are definitely in the extreme metal vein. They bring it back to the opening section from there. Although they take us back to the metal stuff, we get a full prog treatment later. It’s has an odd, almost jazzy element to it. It continues to evolve. This is so quirky and so cool. It’s hard to get a grip on where it’s going, and once you have, it’s moved somewhere else.

The Drill This comes in fast paced and suitably weird, It explodes out from there. Operatic vocals come over the top of stabs of hard edged music. It moves forward from there with drop downs to more opera vocals over some sonic oddity, punctuated by harder rocking bursts of sound. There is sort of a jazz meets space rock section mid-track. From there it grows out into an intriguing rocking movement that comes in tentatively. It turns to something melodic, but tastefully twisted in the “strange” direction. Strange alternative space prog is heard after that section. Then it fires out to screaming (at times literally) jamming.

Rotten Starting in one of the most purely melodic and prog rock based movements, the vocals still lend some strangeness to it. It grows from there with drops down to stripped arrangements coming here and there. This continues to shift and change. There is some more extreme metal around the five minute mark. A drop back to a cool mellow groove gives way to one of the best metal segments of the set. The changes just continue, though.

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