The tricky thing about this Psychedelic Porn Crumpets album, particularly when stacked up against the likes of High Visceral {Part 1}, is that it feels like it has to be constantly in motion. When you hear a song early, it’s fresh. When you hear the same concept rehashed even two songs later, it feels stale. It’s the victim of, somehow, itself – and its environment. SHYGA! The Sunlight Mound falls back on this a little too often.
There’s a wave of psychedelic music coming out of Australia that’s absurdist but suffers from being a bit quiet. It’s like PPC are trying to be the Ur-psych band, which leads to giving too little credit to a listening audience: manifesting in a lack of any real scuzz, too much spacing, and not full-on enough to force you to fill in the blanks; which is what happens when it’s overloaded/overloading. The crux of the matter, as far as their new album is concerned, is that you hear it sometimes, like on ‘Mundungus’, which feels like the track where everything breaks right, and then it’s succeeded immediately by ‘Mango Terrarium’, which happens to be its inverse.
It’s a particularly difficult balance to strike, and it feels like they should’ve gone full tilt absurdist, like Itchy Teeth, or more sludgy like All Them Witches, rather than trying to create their own middle of the road lane. It’s an album that suffers from trying to do a bit of everything, forgetting to be its own thing to the point where it’s frustratingly inconsistent, failing to be an enjoyable listen for more than, maybe, ten consecutive minutes. You can see the building blocks! It should work – but unfortunately, it does not.
