History Up-Tight

Black-clad and with an ominous aura created by their distorted guitar epics, burnt-out ballads and raucous mantric jam, Up-Tight are a force to be reckoned with. Heading up the second generation of Japanese psychedelic rock acts (influenced by acts such as Fushitsusha, Kousokuya and Shizuka) they're one of the best live groups in Japan.

As you might expect from their name, there's a chiselled intensity to their playing which displays some startling post Velvets stances. With the movwa to lay down spontaneusly loose, acid-fried and drugged garage psche jam of hypntoic guitar squall, and a line in impassioned and fathomless vocals that are capable of kicking you right in the gut, up-tight have a mesmeric feel to them, unmatched by any peers.

---From Program Of INSTAL'05 Festival(Glasgow)---

Blending brutalised tripping improv freak-outs with cosmic induced melodic soft psyche Up-Tight arguably provide a structurally sound proposition that's rooted heavily in Western reference points so that the influence of heroes Velvet Underground are keenly apparent bleeding as they do into elements of early Floyd, Sabbath and Spacemen 3.

---From Review On Losing Today(UK)---

The dark shadows cast by this underground Tokyo psych trio have been getting longer of late. We've had two cds from them, both of 'em well-received by the AQ community (the excellent US release Five Psychedelic Pieces on Static Records, and then the maybe even better Lucrezia on Japan's Alchemy label), and some of us here were also just lucky enough to get to witness the power and intensity of Up-Tight's live show when they played in San Francisco quite recently, bringing their melanchoic vox, mantric drum beating, rigid bass pulsations, and guitar-heavy sadness and squall to the tight confines of the Hemlock. As displayed there, Up-Tight's sunglasses-at-night music is aligned with the likes of current Tokyo scene brethren LSD-March in worship of '70s Japanese distorto-psych legends Les Rallizes Denudes, and that's nothin' but a good thing. So another new Up-Tight document is cause for excitement.

---From Review On Aquarius Records(USA) ---

Hamamatu-besed three piece psych group with history dating back to 1992. The current line-up is original memberAoki(vo,g) Ogata(b) and Shirahata(ds) The Ghost Of The Velvet Underground, Rallizes ,and Amon Duul loom large over there their Personal feedback song-distruction universe

---From Japanese Independent music(Sonore:France)---

Up-Tight are a noxious young trio from Tokyo, all acolytes of the legendary Japanese psych group Les Rallizes Denudes, who augment their sound with crushing, Sabbath-styled dynamics, earsplitting acid leads and beautiful Velvets-inspired ballads. If song structures are mostly kept loose, allowingfor lots of noisy improvisation, generarlly the disc is anchored by heavy riffs. Just when you thought you'd got to grips with Tokyo's paradigm destroying psych scene,this one hits like a sucker punch.

---From Review On Wire(UK) ---

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