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Messiness, overindulgence, repetition, and amateurishness are often fine ingredients for great music; some of the most memorable albums of the past 50-odd years have been great combinations of all four. Think of Tony Conrad and Faust's 1972 magnum opus Outside the Dream Syndicate--a fantastic and fascinating tour de force of mind-numbing drone set to a stomping beat so simple that it resembles nothing so much as the human heart. A more contemporary version of such stupid greatness might be Dread by Michigan's Wolf Eyes, a mix of terror and bad chemicals so traumatically creepy that it sits on a plane higher than most attempts at "dark" music. (That it was made by three fairly normal goofballs doesn't hurt.)

Yet these four qualities can just as easily collapse on themselves in combination and make for an awesomely bad time. Japan's long-running and much-revered psychedelic rock band Acid Mothers Temple and the Melting Paraiso U.F.O.--usually known by the much simpler moniker AMT--manage to take all four, throw them together, and utterly bore the crap out of you with its new disc Have You Seen the Other Side of the Sky? Unlike many hippie jams of yore, Have You Seen sounds completely pointless--as opposed to partially pointless but with the occasional good tune. Most of the album's "songs" are tedious guitar freakouts with no discernable character. One terrible notable is "Asimo's Naked Breakfast: Rice and Shrine," wherein meandering guitars, synths, and flute get lost behind a curtain of incredibly tacky faux-orgasmic female groans. Built on thin musical ideas plundered from the '60s and '70s, Have You Seen is thrust through a jokey veneer of Orientalism that, depressingly, some fans are still willing to soak up.