Mahogany Frog: In the Electric Universe

Have you ever tried to catch a frog?

Frogs are impossibly quick. They jump around unpredictably in starts and stops and in every possible direction. By the time you catch up to a frog, that frog is generally somewhere else already. Frogs are very difficult to catch.

Listening to In the Electric Universe is kind of like trying to catch Mahogany Frog. The seventh studio album (and their third for MoonJune Records) from this Canadian electro-psychedelic instrumental quartet jumps from sound to sound and style to style like their wriggling namesake, with daring compositions and arrangements that hit your ears with the solid crack of a wooden bat.

The fourteen-minute, opening tour-de-force "Theme From P.D." immediately proves the instrumental power and prowess that Graham Epp, Jesse Warkentin, Scott Ellenberger and Andy Rudolph communally share, as it patches several themes together in an overarching post-hip-hop, pre-apocalyptic Pink Floyd framework. A tiny percussion heartbeat slowly emerges from the electric mist, but pulls the music into a head-on smashup with a bass drumbeat that explodes with absolutely monstrous echo.

Then everything just stops. You hear what sounds like someone ejecting, turning over and reinserting a tape. The drumbeat builds back up underneath church organ that swells in and out of jamming keyboards, and then the sound shifts into spacecraft mode, lifts off, and fades away. It is a most cinematic and far-ranging "Theme."

"(((Sundog)))" trots along for more than seventeen minutes. It first blossoms into the spacey (and still) futuristic progressive jazz-rock, keyboard-heavy sound of bands such as Soft Machine. But like "Theme From P.D.," it transitions through a mid-song passage into completely different music; in this case, a howling psychedelic blizzard recedes into a more gentle, allegorical folk tale suggesting Dune or Hobbit mythology that keeps repeating to build up its scope and power. " (((Sundog)))" also ends with a visually evocative sound—the sound of a snore rumbling through a dog's furry chest while it snoozes in the warm, golden sun.

Progressive rock is often burdened with several stereotypes but In the Electric Universe hits deep and hard, and is hardly the sound of proggers noodling while they wait for the smoke and their heads to clear.

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