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Green Milk From the Planet Orange, "He's Crying, 'Look'"
The last thing the world needs now is another avant-leaning Japanese psychedelic rock band, especially one with a name as silly and long-winded as Green Milk From the Planet Orange. Their name, besides being a serious impediment to success, sounds like it could be an unpublished manuscript by Dr. Seuss, one of those later works his editor refused to publish because it contained overt drug references. The album is called He's Crying "Look," a cruel juvenile chant which dredged up a whole reservoir of buried childhood trauma that I'd rather not go into right now.Beta-Lactam Ring
The band is a threesome made up of single letter names: K on vocals and guitar, T on bass and A on drums and everything else. Their sound is a looser, less gelled version of Japanese psych-rock group Ghost. Long passages of low-fidelity folk-rock and hushed, muddled vocals (in English, sort of) give way to sudden explosions of incendiary acid rock. T's complex, jazz-influenced bass playing is central to the band's dynamic, by turns melodic and funky. There are areas of straight psych-out too, as in the middle of "When Every Color Turns Black," which at times has the flavor of Pink Floyd's "Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun." There are five tracks on the album, with three of the tracks stretching to epic side length. The lengthier tracks are by far the most enjoyable, moving from quiet ambient improvisation to sudden overamped freakouts with mercurial haphazardness. There are many times on the album where it feels like the band is floundering to find footing, but these moments are balanced with enough good stuff to keep me engaged. Towards the middle of the 18-minute "U-Boat," K yells a bunch of creepy Japanese stuff into a megaphone as K and T build momentum with drum rolls and urgent bass. Then there's a countdown (I think) and the song explodes into an extended King Crimson-style bass and fuzz guitar interplay. Perhaps I am a hopeless dork, but I find this sort of thing irresistible. Ultimately, the quality that sets GMFTPO apart from many of their fellow Japanese psych-rockers is the uncalculated nature of the music. At no point do I feel, as I often do with Acid Mothers Temple, that I am hearing the idea of a song rather than an actual song. At their best and worst, I get the feeling that GMFTPO are playing the kind of music that they love, and they are not allowing things like taste or restraint to intermediate (which is a good thing). - 
