Psych albums
Say Psych: Album Review – Heaven by Sundays and Cybele
I first came across Sundays and Cybele earlier this year when I heard the 2012 album release ‘Gypsy House’, which had just come out on vinyl on the brilliant Tokyo label GuruGuru Brain. If you are in any doubt about this check out the label’s Japanese Psych Compilation ‘GuruGuru Brainwash‘ which is a fantastically eclectic …
Table Scraps : More Time For Strangers
Birmingham, England’s Table Scraps are a duo that sound like more than the sum of their parts. The racket they make on their debut album More Time For Strangers is that of a Gothic Ty Segall; a hollowed-out, ghostly Stooges haunting Blue Cheer on some abandoned, dilapidated Michigan farm. This is dark, bellowing garage rock coming from …
Psych Insight: EP Review – Array 1 by Loop
When the Pixies released the first of their three EPs after a prolonged absence, back in 2013, many suspected that the decision to stagger their new material was deliberately made to circumvent the critical emphasis that would have been inevitably placed on the songs, had they been released together in the traditional album format. It’s …
Album Review: 10 000 Russos – ’10 000 Russos’
Photograph by Betânia Liberato 10 000 Russos, pronounced “dez mil russos” are the latest spell-weavers to join the illustrious Fuzz Club Records banner. I recently commented that Casper was perhaps a descendant of the renowned 16th century alchemist John Dee – that he continues to conjure these latter-day “Nuggets” seemingly at will, suggests I may not have been …
Album Review: Evening Fires – ‘Where I’ve Been Is Places and What I’ve Seen Is Things’
‘Where I’ve Been Is Places and What I’ve Seen Is Things’ is, “the newest album in Evening Fires ongoing story. Once again recorded in the their ‘secret Appalachian den,’ “WIBIPAWISIT” was mastered by Kramer and is Evening Fires at their finest. Described as peddlers of that old-time rural acid rock and purveyors of Appalachian space rock, Evening …
Say Psych: Album Review – Pan by White Manna
A number of reviews of this latest album by Californian five piece White Manna have inevitably rested on their space rock credentials in relation to prime movers of the genre, Hawkwind. While this is understandable it is, in my view, also a little unfortunate because I rate this album as being significantly better than anything …
Say Psych: Album Review – Keeper of the Dawn by Ancient River
At a time when every man and his bong can be said to be exploring the final frontier with cathedral reverb plastered all over their stoned guitar noodling, it is becoming increasingly difficult to stand apart from the rabble. Ancient River try their best at saying something new by, perversely, not saying very much at …
Psych Insight: New Music – Open Visions EP by Kobadelta
There is something of the night about Kobadelta, in the way that there is something of the night about The Amazing Snakeheads. The band’s songs are reminiscent of drunken late nights in back alleys where under the haze of darkness and incoherence, they stumble across liminal realities which the band crystallise through their music. I …
Album Review: Sonic Jesus – ‘Neither Virtue Nor Anger’
‘Neither Virtue Nor Anger’ by Sonic Jesus, is perhaps 2015’s most eagerly anticipated debut LP, certainly for those fortunate souls who take their music with more than just a pinch of gravitas. Few releases have me contemplating the juxtaposition of Platonist preponderance over Aristotle’s ‘Ethica Nicomachea’, combined with Blake’s adherence that “there is no suffering except …
Psych Insight: Album Review – Hypnophobia by Jacco Gardner
Well Jacco’s caught me out again. When I first came across his music ahead of the Liverpool PsychFest in 2013 I was fairly unimpressed by what I heard that I didn’t have him on my list to see. I caught him quite by mistake while finding myself in the same room as he was performing, …