When they take the stage, Ahleuchatistas pretty much look like a classic power trio: guitar, bass, and drums. It's just a trick of the eye, though: Throughout its history, this band has sounded more like a trio with the power on the fritz, their instrumental music a series of sputtering Beefheartian paroxysms wedded to fleeting passages of muscular groove. They don't like you to get comfortable listening to their records, preferring to throw you off the scent of a rhythm with a sudden time change or all-out shift into dry, clattering freakout. So it makes sense that they've landed on John Zorn's Tzadik label, which is known for housing a lot of music that would sooner hit you with a shovel than caress or soothe you.
The Asheville, N.C.-based trio hasn't changed its essential sound much, in spite of the departure of original drummer Sean Dail and the addition of his replacement, Ryan Oslance. The biggest shifts are a single, brief sample of a human voice low in the mix at the end of the sarcastically titled "Dancing With the Stars", and the very occasional use of distortion on Shane Perlowin's guitar, which until now had been dogmatically clean-toned, leaving the distorted playing to Derek Poteat's bass. Oslance's drumming is a bit looser than Dail's, and the album's overall balance is weighed more toward seething, arrhythmic passages than before.
You get a fair tour of the band's unique world on opener "2/3 Consensus on the Un-Finite Possibilities". The first few minutes of the track is like climbing a mountain, as the combination of worming anti-melody and increasingly tense rhythm congeal until the five-minute mark, when the track explodes with cycling guitar and bass riffs as the drum part elasticizes, tightening and loosening at breakneck speed. It collapses into a meditative coda that could be the descent back to base camp. Oslance's best showcase is "Why Can't We Be in Jamaica?", where he plays a circular, almost tribal pattern that mutates over the course of the song as Poteat's distorted bass slings mud at it, and Perlowin's guitar swells in and out with spine-tingling drones. The band's signature onslaught of complex, hyperspeed interplay is on display on "Owls" and "Racing Towards the Hard Kernal", but in completely different ways-- the former sparkles with bright phrases and is full of breathing room, while the latter is heavy, dense, and violent.
That's a pretty good example of what makes Ahleuchatistas work so well-- they've perfected their extremely basic approach to the point where it seems they can do anything they want with it. I do wonder if the faint whiff of a sample is a foreshadowing of change, but as the band continues to find more ways to make the chaos/order dynamic at its core interesting, it seems evident it doesn't need a lot of outside help to make good, surprising elements that hold your attention, so long as you're the type of listener who enjoys the abstract and somewhat difficult.
