Album Review: Thought Forms – Clean

You know them well. They were fashionable at the end of the 60s, and usually play in the Luxembourg Gardens, or in neighborhood MJCs during smoky jam evenings to fill in the gaps in the agenda. Yes, today we are going to talk about hippies. If the smell of patchouli, the pastel colors of the harem pants, and the sight of blond dreadlocks hadn’t alerted you, the pocket square with yin-yang moon motifs in pyrography on beech board sold at an anti-globalization festival in the Creuse should end up selling. set the scene for you.

Thought Forms, because it is about them here, are however initially not really to be placed in this category. Active since 2006, the group with a name taken from theosophist writings and the theory of forms of thought has so far placed itself more in a post-psycho rock movement, occasionally cutting back on heavy stoner since the album Ghost Mountainin 2013. A song named Sound Of Violence will even be released in 2014 on the EP Split, as these people clearly have taste.
And so here they are back in 2022, under a somewhat different and unexpected aesthetic and direction, that, acoustically, of Mother Nature and of the Nitemare Hippy Girl of friend Beck. The album does not hide it, the cover forces the line, and the name of Clean actually proves to be very fair from a first song, Hiding Beneath, which offers us a vision all in arpeggios of folk guitar of the hovering post-rock songs that we knew until then from Thought Forms. The first sitar sounds appear on Our Ghostsjust like the ethereal and distant voice of Charlie Romijn, we rediscover an inner closeness with India and Nepal that we thought lost since our previous reincarnation, and we light a first stick of Nag Champa incense for the atmosphere .

Atmosphere that continues in an album that is not particularly surprising, while what we imagine to be a tabla, a sort of Indian tam-tam, is patiently revealed on wide-eyed. Further away, fires that takes sitar and mandolin on a throbbing, intoxicating march, lost in the hypnotic smoke and the hovering rhythm, both slow and jerky, of the traditions of the Orient. burn me finally concludes the album with ten minutes of transcendental music, to leave us, a little perplexed, in full meditation alongside a benevolent bodhisattva under the roofs of a Himalayan monastery.
Our preparation for spiritual awakening complete, what remains? Unfortunately not much. A relaxed feeling, a general idea, and three quarters of an hour without much imagination or risk taking, for a rendering that shouldn’t be very exciting, if not for a little smoke party or a Tibetan massage. The intention behind is probably not bad, the vein could have potential, but we do not feel in this new album by Thought Forms any desire to create anything other than an imitation of Hindu ambient music, mixed with a post-rock in an acoustic version which already had very little original.

However, we won’t speak of a disappointment here, because we didn’t expect much either, but we hope for a burst of creativity for the future, even if it means mixing this oriental-acoustic essay with a stoner rock in the future. a little more loaded, to become something other than background music for a role-playing scenario with a mystical-mystical vocation. With that, I go back to my business, I arrive at the door of my apartment, it’s locked, I roll a 100 die, and… oops, critical failure.