Albany New York’s Otobo challenge the listener with boundary-defying music that has the strangeness of Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd. This trio’s 2022 self-titled debut features field recordings consisting of sounds from oil tanks and other objects used for percussion and samples. Needless to say, for these guys, the feel of an album as a whole is more important than the individual songs.

On this third release, Otobo perform more as a band than on their prior records. Inside Machines finds the group in a place where they show off their chops like a progressive rock outfit. Clearly, they have been improving as musicians and have developed a newfound sense of confidence in their abilities, which they are eager to put to work.

There are ample “headbanging” moments on Inside Machines, where the music comes down like a thunderstorm, with the musicianship performed with fastidious precision as it navigates odd time signatures and shifting tempos with effortless mastery.

Even as Otobo move away from their surreal atmospheric origins, they haven’t completely abandoned their past either. Improvisational saxophones aren’t new to the band’s music, but on “Omen” the saxophones sound delightfully unruly, accompanied by metal-influenced math rock music. Mysterious sound effects and subtle synth textures are everywhere, bringing the band’s older psychedelic leanings into its newer more upfront and meaner sound.

Math rock is one way to describe Inside Machines. But this makes it seem like the album is solely driven by machine-like repetition of complex rhythms. The album has so much more heart than that; it doesn’t feel “mechanical.” The soft vocals on the opener “iOpen” make its monotonous recitation of the words quirkily human rather than robotic. The melodious dreamy guitars on “Violent Lies” along with the peculiar sound effects have a Radiohead-like yearning, as when Radiohead themselves tackle the coldness of technology with the warmth of human vulnerability. Meanwhile “Love Spirals Tight” inhabits its own world, away from the rest of the record, like a wonderful surprise, with airy dream pop guitars and tender vocals: an outlier of a song that oddly represents the outlier nature of the album itself.

Rating: B+

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