As a general rule of thumb, give us a collaborative project featuring a member of The Mars Volta and we’re there, no questions asked. In this instance, Mars Volta vocalist Cedric Bixler Zavala lends his lungs to an excursion helmed by Triclops! founder Christian Eric Beaulieu, with the considerable added benefit of bass tracks supplied by former Minuteman and present-day Stooge Mike Watt.
Anywhere’s oeuvre is broadly compartmentalised as “Eastern acoustic punk”: there’s nothing not to like in that description, and there’s nothing not to like in the music itself. It’s just that you find yourself wanting more of everything: the potential is here to achieve something that gushes head-splitting transcendence. Beaulieu’s open-tuned acoustic guitar approximates a sitar in texture and modality, and while the album’s instrumental opener, Pyramid Mirrors, promisingly hammers in with a febrile 7/8 lope and digital tabla, it rather marks time thereafter.
More effective are gentler interludes such as the appropriately mesmerising Shaman Mantra and the dreamy mirage spiral of Dead Golden West, with its counter-melody picked out on a toy piano. The mutated shuffle rhythm of Infrared Moses intriguingly implies that the Ganges and the Mississippi Delta have more in common than any of us could have imagined.
