psychedelia
joe.muggs
There’s been a lot of early 90s rave aesthetics in popular culture lately, but an awful lot of it has been at the level of signifiers. Fila, Stüssy, Air Max 90s, smiley faces, sirens, rewinds, crowd noises, hop in a Ford Cortina, tribes coming together, dancing at dawn, baggy hoodies for goalposts, isn’t it, wasn’t it, hmm? There’s been a little less discussed, though, about what raving actually felt like, and in particular that it its revolutionary character came from everyone having the same feeling of being on the same drug at the same time.Again, we might see the signifiers of tablets, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
After the client has settled on the analyst’s couch, the lights are dimmed. Music sets the mood. A wordless vocal is accompanied by chimes. Cool saxophone breezes in. Sparse piano lines ripple like heat haze. Drums are understated, yet oddly insistent. The atmosphere is mysterious. Increasingly enflamed.Then, a voice begins speaking. It seems incorporeal; neither that of the analyst or the person seeking understanding. There is mention of mood swings which cannot be controlled, of an ancient love coloured by the sands of time. Gradually, as one track bleeds into the next, the speaker Read more ...
theartsdesk
The weather is perfect. Rare at a festival in this country. The sun shines. Occasional clouds pass. There’s a light breeze. Flamingods are on the Charlie Gillett stage. They are a London-based unit of primarily Bahraini origin who make psychedelic-electronic rock tinged with exotica and Middle Eastern flavour. Very WOMAD, in other words.All around are iterations of hippy, from gnarled Sixties originals, lined and lived-in, batik-patchwork panted, to psy-trancey youths, half-clad, sleek in bodypaint and retro pink Lennon shades. We jog and nod. The music is likeable, not ecstatic. The vibe, Read more ...
joe.muggs
Two of the biggest trends in 21st century pop culture today have been “poptimism” – broadly, the idea that pop as such is as serious and worthy of analysis as any other artform – and a kind of everything-everywhere-all-at-once telescoping of past influences into a grab bag of total availability. The former tendency has rather clotted into received wisdom (fuelled by click addiction) that bigger is better and Taylor Swift therefore deserves more critical attention than anyone else. The latter – though it has led to plenty of interesting lanes of subcultural scholarship – is often derided for Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It kicks off with “No Easy Way Down.” First released on 1984’s mini-LP Explosions in the Glass Palace, it was an instant benchmark by which to measure Rain Parade. Churning, dense and foggy, it made good on what this California outfit were portrayed as: integral to a Sixties-inspired wave of bands defiantly reconfiguring the past for the present. Not all Rain Parade songs were like this, but “No Easy Way Down” was a head-spinner. It still is.What was dubbed The Paisley Underground also scooped up The Bangles, The Dream Syndicate, The Long Ryders and The Three O’Clock. But “No Easy Way Down” Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Out on the perimeters where there are no stars, in a void full of bong-smoke and synesthetic noise… there, in a greasy biker hovel full of gigantic amps, there live Wytch Pycknyck. Some say that place is called Hastings. Whatever it’s called, this four-piece arrive to reinvigorate heavy rock with a demented energy, zigzagged to the gills with lysergic spirit and a belief in gutter-punk rock’n’roll.Their debut album’s opening lines, on the speeding, riff-tastic smasher “Rawkuss”, are “I wanna party with the animals and live in the zoo”. It’s not metal, although the music tips its hat that way Read more ...
joe.muggs
The noise in the international mainstream in recent years might be about dance-pop, hip hop beefs and the serious balladry of Taylor, Billie and Lana – yet at the same time, R&B has been strange, brilliant, ultra-popular, but generated a tiny fraction of the column inches and “discourse”.Jhene Aiko, Tinashe, SZA, H.E.R., Mahalia: these are radical artists, each making fascinating music that generates billions of streams, yet certainly in the UK they’re generating micro-fractions of the column inches that their contemporaries in other genres are. The reaction to SZA’s Glastonbury Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
VINYL OF THE MONTHAriel Sharratt & Matthias Kom Never Work (BB*Island) + Ella Ronen The Girl With No Skin (BB*Island)Two offbeat albums from the uncategorisable Hamburg label BB*Island. They are home to the literary indie outfit The Burning Hell. The central figures of that band are Canadian singers Mathias Kom and Ariel Sharratt (assuming the latter is Canadian as Google wouldn't tell me). Together, their second album is a concept affair loaded with brilliant, poignant freak-folk responses to contemporary capitalism, the gig economy and similar. These include the inspiring title track “ Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Isobel Campbell has maintained a consistent career on the fringes of popular music for three decades. She's made a home in the area where indie, folk, rock and BBC 6Music merge. Aside from her 1990s involvement with Belle and Sebastian, she’s best-known for her trio of albums with the late Mark Lanegan, her gracefulness and crafted precision working well against his gruff world weariness. Following that, she was scuppered for a while by legal label entanglements, but since 2020 has been up and at ‘em again, following her own path. The best word for her latest album is “shimmering”; 13 head- Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The final track of Samana’s third album is titled “The Preselis,” after the west Welsh mountain range – the place antiquarians suggested as the source of Stonehenge’s blue stones. The song’s opening lyrics are “The blue stones, they grow over me, Carved into mountains, the blood of need.” Later, the words “anima” and “animus” are repeated before the song ends with the recurring refrain “Lay the body down.”Dovetailing a tenet of Jungian psychology – anima, the female unconscious of a male, and animus, the male unconscious of a female – with notions of an evocative landscape firmly places Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Original pressings of Love And Poetry sell for up to £2,800. Copies of the August 1969 debut album by Andwellas Dream can sometimes also be found for £700, a relative bargain in the context of the upper limit of the prices the collector’s market has settled on.There were two follow-up albums – each credited to Andwella. August 1970’s World's End fetches around £40 to £80; People's People, issued in late 1970, attracts prices of £50 to £100. Cult stuff then, with interest centred on that first album. And where there’s such appeal, repressings follow. Love And Poetry was first reissued in 1995 Read more ...
joe.muggs
This is a reviewer’s nightmare: it’s literally just Khruangbin doing what Khruangbin do. As ever, the Texan trio are rolling out laid-back psychedelic spaghetti western Tex-Mex country-soul-funk groove after laid-back psychedelic spaghetti western Tex-Mex country-soul-funk groove, all drenched in the usual hazy reverb that practically demand you start drawing for adjectives like “sun-bleached” and talk about big skies and desert landscapes. The instrumentation is, as ever, all super-trad too. Bass, drums, guitar and just tiny wisps of Hammond organ and vocal are recorded in lovingly analogue Read more ...