psychedelia
Tim Cumming
As this review goes live on the internet – an invisible medium even more pervasive than coronavirus – we’ve just enjoyed All Hallow’s Eve with not only a Blue Moon but October’s Hunter’s Moon, too, gazing down upon us from the constellation of Taurus, while today is All Souls’ Day, when the spirits of the dead are abroad and life is celebrated and decorated with skulls and skeletons. As winter approaches, this astro-cosmic emanation of the spirit world of magic and ritual – like the internet or Covid-19, another invisible medium – is celebrated and enacted in Cunning Folk’s arresting new Read more ...
joe.muggs
This is a musical homecoming for Róisín Murphy, both geographically and figuratively. She may have been raised in Dublin and spent her gig-going adolescence in Manchester, but Sheffield is where she began her life as a clubber and performer – and it’s with Sheffield scene mainstay of almost four decades, and Murphy’s friend of quarter of a century, Richard “Parrot” Barratt that she’s collaborated here. And Murphy may have explored all kinds of experimental and pop styles, but the place where she’s always been at her most confident (not that she lacks confidence anywhere) is on the dancefloor Read more ...
joe.muggs
A new and very strange kind of pop music has bubbled up over the past half-decade plus. It’s internationalist, rooted in both underground electronics and the most populist styles, bound up with playful but sometimes terrifying ultra high definition psychedelic aesthetics, and dominated by female and non-binary musicians. It’s given a platform to some of the most vivid and fascinating characters in music today, from Beijing’s 33EMYBW to Margate’s BABii, Washington DC’s Swan Meat to Montevideo’s Lila Tirando a Violeta, and most prominently Glaswegian SOPHIE and Caracas-via-Barcelona Arca. Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
New Heavy Sounds is one of Britain’s most exciting and undersung labels. Founded in 2011, they have consistently released music that boasts innovation, imagination and a strong female presence. The added sweetener is that this comes attached to sheer guitar-slingin’ power of the kind heavy rockers, from the 1970s to the present, have always relished. Styling themselves in favour of “anything with dirty, big riffs and attitude,” their output has one foot in the metal camp but aspirations beyond it. The two men behind New Heavy Sounds, Ged Murphy and Paul Cox, avoid gimmicks and hype and let Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Shoegaze stable Sonic Cathedral has, in truth, always been a much broader church than its name implies. From the psychedelic, sunshine pop of Gulp, to the blistering art noise of Spectres, it has consistently released music that shares a similar heritage, without putting all its pedals on the same board.Bedroom, the debut album from Leeds/Hull-based five-piece bdrmm, however, plays exquisitely to type. It channels the shoegaze sound with such purpose and resolve it’s hard to believe most of band weren’t born when My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless nearly crippled Creation.Brimming with taught Read more ...
Owen Richards
Don’t do drugs, kids. For the past 50 years, that’s been the consistent message. But how much of what we know about psychedelics is just fearmongering? Do you really want to jump out of a window? Will you permanently lose your mind? To find out the truth behind the campaigns, writer Donick Cary dives into the real-life trips of a gaggle of famous faces for this multicoloured Netflix documentary.When you think of rock stars on drugs, you might imagine tragic scenes of excess and overdose. It’s unlikely you picture Sting birthing a cow while tripping on Mexican peyote. But this farcical tableau Read more ...
joe.muggs
A singer-songwriter of somewhat mystical bent, originally from a forested island in the US Pacific Northwest, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith really came into her own when she discovered vintage synthesizers. In particular, her masterpiece, 2016's EARS, saw her vocals merging into the rich flows of bubbling tones, melodies channelling folk traditions from various corners of the world, creating an unmistakably utopian sound. It felt neither futurist nor retro – rather, of a part with Craig Leon's Interplanetary Folk Music or Ursula K. Le Guin & Todd Barton Music and Poetry of the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A raga-rock circularity. Finger cymbals. A distant, etiolated female vocal. A fuggy atmosphere. A kinship with Jefferson Airplane’s “Come Up The Years”, The Jesus and Mary Chain’s “Just Like Honey” and The Velvet Underground’s “All Tomorrow’s Parties”. Hangman’s Beautiful Daughters' “Love is Blue” is a beautiful, haunting recording.The band’s “Outta My Head” is as great, but is taken at a faster tempo and along the lines of US Sixties psych-garage rockers The Neighb'rhood Childr'n or “Don't Cry Your Tears”, the 1981 single by Edinburgh band The Delmontes.“Outta My Head” and “Love is Blue” are Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Two of the 84 tracks on A Slight Disturbance In My Mind: The British Proto-Psychedelic Sounds of 1966 are covers of songs from Revolver. One is a rendering of “Tax Man” (sic) by a band named Loose Ends which was enterprisingly issued as a single on the same August 1966 day The Beatles’ album was released. Despite the addition to the arrangement of bongos, spiralling soul-type organ and an odd spindly guitar line it’s pretty faithful to the original and not too exciting.The other is Hertfordshire band The Mirage’s re-rendering of “Tomorrow Never Knows”, which hit record shops in December 1966 Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The titles conveyed the enthusiasm. “A Girl Named Sandoz”, “Gratefully Dead”, “Monterey”, “San Franciscan Nights” and “Yes, I am Experienced”. LSD, The Grateful Dead, Monterey Pop Festival, San Francisco and Jimi Hendrix. There they were, explicit tags confirming that The Animals’ Eric Burdon had been psychedelicised. Three years on from 1964's “House of the Rising Sun”, he was a changed man.It wasn’t unusual for British pop. Whole bands and members of outfits who had traded in edgy R&B and blues had tuned in. The Pretty Things did so. Zoot Money turned his Big Roll band into Dantalian’s Read more ...
joe.muggs
Around the turn of the millennium, when Dan Snaith started releasing music – initially as Manitoba, then Caribou, and latterly also Daphni – he tended to get lumped in with the folktronica movement. In fact, the closest he came to actual folk was a heavy influence from the more delicate side of late 60s psychedelia. But, as with many of the other acts tagged with the f-word like his friend and ally Kieran “Four Tet” Hebden, it was really a clumsy signifier for people who were refusing to accept the artificial separation between “electronic music” and the rest which had become reified with the Read more ...
Owen Richards
And so, Tame Impala’s evolution from riff-laden psych-mongers to dancefloor-fillers is complete. It’s undeniable from the opening drum machine on “One More Year” supplanting Kevin Parker’s trademark kit-work. The band’s music has always been built from the groove up, but now the head banging has been replaced with waves of rhythm that flow through the body. The Slow Rush is an apt name. This is an album that replicates the wash of a narcotic come-up. Unstoppable, inimitable, and highly addictive.A sense of joyous adventure carries through the songs, less concerned with the destination than Read more ...