The question of what to release first is a dilemma for any new group, but especially so when the individual members already have recognizable styles. They can test the waters with a quick, don't-hold-us-to-this EP, or roll the full-length dice and hope their sound stands up without pinning them down. Rangda-- the trio of guitarists Sir Richard Bishop (Sun City Girls) and Ben Chasny (Six Organs of Admittance) and drummer Chris Corsano-- have figured out a way to do both. False Flag is like two three-song EPs checker-boarded into one stellar album. Each odd-numbered track offers improvised blare, while the evens are all structured songs. That division may seem pretty Jekyll/Hyde, but False Flag never feels like play-acting. Together only half a year, Rangda is already making music that sounds both fully developed and open-ended.
Which means that the trio's noisier leanings are just as drenched in thought and interaction as their melodic side. Their all-out improvisations could have easily sounded like weekend workouts, but intense concentration and muscular effort course through these escalating jams. Most impressive is the telepathy between Bishop and Chasny. On opener "Waldorf Hysteria", their racing chords have a rhyming quality, as if the pair were playing catch with a ball of noise. Corsano fares just as well. His cascading drumming on "Fist Family" is so entrancing, it locks the guitars like charmed snakes into long, humming tones.
Snake charming and other Eastern rituals factor in everything Bishop does, and there are traces of his worldly influences throughout False Flag (the band name comes from a Balinese demon queen). But those influences are never played up as exotic or grafted on like a fake accent. Raga-ish guitar figures are mostly just hinted at, and the ritualistic breaks in "Serrated Edges" are as natural as those in the best Sun City Girls blasts. In fact, the most intriguing influences here are Western. "Bull Lore" sounds like Earth's dusty twang mixed with the hypnosis of the Beatles' "Because", while the soft "Sarcophagi" evokes the halting minimalism of Loren Connors.
False Flag ends with a blissful vista called "Plain of Jars", perhaps the closest thing here to a Six Organs/Sun City hybrid. Again, Western influences poke through, particularly the drifting, we've-got-all-night excursions of Sonic Youth's "Rain on Tin", Neil Young's "Down by the River", and Jimi Hendrix's "Third Stone from the Sun". But what's most striking about "Plain of Jars" is how much shorter it feels than its 15-minute length. Close your eyes and you can practically see all the different paths Rangda might have trekked down were they not restricted by the confines of a recording. The same is true of False Flag as a whole-- its fertile sounds suggest a wide-open future for a band that hopefully has a long life planned.
