THE RA-6600 - Alien Planet review

Year : 2015
Genre :Vintage Piano Rock with Glam, Psychedelic, and Doom Drone affections
Label : HEMBOT Records
Origin : United States
Official site : > - here - <

The (Panasonic) RA-6600 is not only a highly renowned vintage equipment suitable for multitrack ound recording, it also is the chosen moniker to highlight occurrences of a quite distinctive brand of sound manipulation - both rhetorically invented and masterminded by RA-6600's premier songwriter and frontman Daniel Olivas.

The disc is a self-referential looped chronicle of insatiably eager introspection, deliberately filtered through the reality tunnel of a 14 year old youngster: a series of six-, straight-to-the-point status reports on six different shades of the ever-abundant cartoon elegy. Filled with harmonic structures that skillfully reflect the most well established traditions of massively piano driven melodic rock, what separates the Ra-6600 project from the countless peers stuck on the Sir Elton John bandwagon, - not as if there were anything necessarily shameful about being stuck in/on anything/anyone - is the sense of evident irony Olivas is able to court these familiar musical passages with. Read on to know more.

The mere correctness of the assumption on how Daniel Olivas is a simultaneous melodic glam rock aficionado AND a covert (?) melodic glam rock critic, seems to be evident through the production choices that which abundantly reflect a highly intriguing disregard towards each and every - supposedly - consensual agreement on how melodic glam rock is supposed to be played.

This six declarations of brittle, yet playfully toxic emotional doom demand an increased amount of attention via rather unorthodox-, nevertheless efficient artistic conducts and creative decisions that each seek to meaningfully deviate from what you would "normally" expect from the precisely outlined genre. Yet, what others write with a feather pendant, Olivas writes with a granite chisel, only SHAPED as a feather pendant. The music on the disc, while it deliberately radiates an emotional stance that already have accepted defeat and even had made peace with it, it expresses an ever-present discontent with the situation - primarily as result of how this music reigns able to instill an interestingly uncomfortable character, a sensation of imminent threat, into the fabric of sounds. "Oh, yes, I'm just an elegic fool folks, but I guess we do not yet know if I ever go postal one day - maybe tomorrow, maybe now, maybe never." 

The following comparison might sounds strange - and I apologize in advance if it does not, after all - but I definitely pick up on Nirvana vibes throughout this disc, and, the mere fact that Olivas keeps the inner demons at bay at all times as opposed of releasing them, makes the music more interesting and hilariously/emotionally frightening. Mind us that these percepts are highly subjective, of course, yet it is no small feat to draw such forms into a random listener on the spot, while the best the critic can do, is to not to second guess her/his impressions. 

THE RA-6600 project is giving you superbly crafted buildings block that could be the pillars of seriously iconic/dangerous doom metal akin to that of Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats, and, the reason that this disc is so special, is that we won't likely ever know if Olivas is aware of this potentiality, or, just chose to hide it with clever intention altogether. A definite recommendation.

Check out the disk on HEMBOT Records at the official site located here.

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