The latest release from these enigmatic Texas psych weirdos did not grab me quite as quickly as some of their previous releases, but I am now quite convinced that it’s arguably their finest album. While some other albums may feature stronger songs, this album is all about immersive and otherworldly atmosphere: all resemblance to a conventional rock band has officially vanished and the macabre illusion is now fully complete, as Spiritually Unemployed sounds and feels like a hallucinatory sound collage left behind by an ancient jungle cult.
To Ak’Chamel’s credit, the creepy immersiveness of that spell was earned the hard way, as they were impressively inventive in finding cool new methods for making every sound feel time-ravaged and otherworldly. My favorite one was that they powered their gear with dying generators “which introduced random voltage drops, speed fluctuations, and ghostly dropouts mid-take — turning tracking into unpredictable spirit interventions.” They also buried and exhumed tapes, ran tape through sandpaper, filled spring reverb units with gravel, and wielded an array of broken, detuned, and self-built instruments purposely left outside in the elements. The result sounds like a sunbleached and warped tape of a supernaturally unsettling Sublime Frequency comp.
I have been a pretty devoted fan of this project since their first Akuphone album (2020’s The Totemist), but that fandom has admittedly had some rocky stretches at times, as the genuine flashes of genius in Ak-Chamel’s career have been admittedly interspersed with moments of oppressive gloom, half-baked cassette releases, hammy theatricality, and questionably improv-heavy live performances. To be fair, however, many of those same charges could be made about Ak’Chamel’s kindred spirits Sun City Girls and they are stone-cold underground music royalty: there are definitely no maps to wherever the hell these sheet-shrouded psychedelic shamen are headed, so there are inevitably going to be some wrong turns along the way.
The important thing is that Ak’Chamel have a wonderfully trippy and unsettling vision and their major releases are roughly trending towards increasingly vivid and immersive glimpses of that haunted, mysterious, and half-rotted world. When they are at their best, Ak’Chamel seem less like a band than like a worn and blurry VHS tape of a forbidden ritual left behind by a group of vanished archeologists (think The Blair Witch Project meets Cannibal Holocaust with an (un)healthy dose of jet-black humor, if you will).
The brief yet perfect opener “My Ouija Board Spelt S-C-A-M” sets the stage beautifully in that regard, as booming battle horns herald the arrival of a lurching, ragged, and ritualistic procession of Arabic string melodies, slow-motion drums, and a decent amount of droning, howling, and whooshing psychedelia in the periphery. The album’s unsettling centerpiece “Dreams of a Dead Dreamer” follows immediately after, as a “haunted hoedown” violin motif and an eerie vocal wail insistently loop over a killer slow-motion groove that lurches like an undead horde in search of fresh victims. There’s also an impressively majestic and ouroboros-like organ motif that absolutely fucking rules, but the song takes a hard detour for its second half into something that sounds like a seance with a croaking demon broadcast from the depths of hell.
Other highlights include the haunted desert psychedelia of “We Sleep in the Self,” which sounds like Sir Richard Bishop backed by smeared and ghostly accordion chords and melancholy Middle Eastern woodwind melodies. Elsewhere, “Serpent House” is the probably album’s most perfectly realized illusion, as it improbably sounds like a frayed and sharp-edged field recording of a raucous half-time show drumline getting entangled with a curdled and howling bagpipe ensemble in a labyrinthine Moroccan alley. The darkly immersive spell admittedly dissipates a little bit on the album’s more eclectic second half, as the band variously delve into jaggedly dissonant “locked groove” convulsions (“Paramasturbatory Delusions”), jabbering and blown-out cacophony (“The Cosmic Vulva vs. The Post-Enlightened Tongue”), a few passages resembling an unhinged and infernal puppet chorus, and even an actual song with vocals (“Nothin Wounded Goes Uphill”).
For the most part, however, Ak’Chamel’s creepy and unnerving spell is beautifully sustained for the album’s entire duration, which is a genuinely impressive feat. There are very few moments at all in which Spiritually Unemployed sounds like the work of an earthbound band living in 21st century America and a hell of a lot of moments in which it sounds like otherworldly “found sound” dark sorcery transporting me to the deepest, most remote jungle in all of nightmareland—and possibly even to “irrevocable, total fucking ego death” as well, if you are willing to take Ak’Chamel at their word. I certainly have no reason to doubt them, as they have never claimed to be deceivers as far as I know (only givers of illness, divinatory monkeys, crazed bones, a venereal head, an ibex entrails string band, and an ecstatic brotherhood).
