Verma

A departure from Chicagoans Verma's usual Krautrock sympathies here, but a very welcome one as the group expands into cinematic textures on their latest album, Coltan, for Trouble In Mind. The album was written as a soundtrack to VICE's "Guide To The Congo" and it's meant to underscore the devastation of mining Columbite-Tantalite, an ore used in the manufacture of capacitors found in everyday electronics. The mining has devastated the region and fittingly the thrust of Coltan paints a bleak sonic picture, with each of the four improvised pieces displaying a dour edge cut through the band's dark psychedelia. Fraught with a knotted tension and slashed deep with welcome amounts of flashing feedback, on paper the album sounds foreboding, and for the most part it is. As such it makes an excellent accompaniment to its subject matter; but its also an extremely accomplished set of ink black cosmic psych that stands alone from the documentary as a welcome addition to the canon of gathered cloud psychedelia, cinematic psych of the type that sits easily among bands like Barn Owl, Date Palms, Danny Paul Grody and even Gnod in some places. It’s a thunderous work that seems to close in as quickly as the branches of a deep and knotted jungle, eager to swallow whole those who have gutted its precious resources. Trouble in Mind were absolutely correct in their assertion that this needed to be rescued from its original tape run and cut to vinyl.

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