This is not your grandaddy’s power trio. Not unless your pop-pop worshipped at the well-worn altars of Hawkwind, The Stooges, MC5, Butthole Surfers, The Damned, Jimi Hendrix and Can. If he did, good news: You’ll find traces and echoes of all of them on Omegaville, the expansive and destructive third album from guitar-rock alpha males Anthroprophh. Fronted by singer-guitarist Paul Allen — no, not the Microsoft guy — these barnburning Bristol bruisers unleash a frenzied fever-dream onslaught of sounds, styles and straight-up insanity over the length of this shape-shifting 98-minute epic. Some songs chug and clang and sear like OG punk firecrackers. Others blaze up the fuzz-busting wah-wah workouts of stoner rock and space-metal. Still others blast apart and reassemble the prog, psych and noise paradigms with hypnotic circular riffs, stream of consciousness arrangements, white-hot sonics, peripheral voices and treated vocals. Time is not an issue; cuts range in length from two-minute sprints to mind-melting 21-minute excursions that chart a course for the nether reaches of the galaxy. In either case, Allen spends much of his time and energy toggling between majestically monolithic riffs and free-wheeling flights of fretboard fancy, underpinned by a rhythm section that displays all the unleashed momentum and sheer brute force of a woolly mammoth stampede. Simultaneously mighty, weird and mighty weird, Omegaville is both departure point and destination for a one-way journey to the centre of your mind. Come along if you dare. Bring pop-pop.
