A Richly Detailed, Psychedelic Layer Cake From Polish Rockers the White Kites

The White Kites‘ previous album Missing was a mix of spot-on 60s and 70s art-rock and psychedelia. Their latest release, Devillusion – streaming at Bandcamp – has more of a 70s vibe. David Bowie is the obvious reference point, with echoes of the Beatles, ELO and even Jethro Tull as well as artsy 90s bands like Pulp. The group’s playful sense of humor often masks a dark undercurrent. This is a long record, fourteen tracks of catchy, purist tunesmithing, outside-the-box sonics and strange interludes, best appreciated as a cohesive whole.

They open the album with Spinning Lizzie, a Bowie-esque take on funk, the guitars of Przemek Piłaciński and Bartek Woźniak flaring over the squiggles of Jakub Lenarczyk’s keys and bassist Marysia Białota’s overdubbed combo organ. Frontman Sean Palmer delivers a deadpan account of an increasingly thorny acid trip in the second track, Rather Odd over Lenarczyk’s stately piano and organ swirls

With its ba-bump noir cabaret phantasmagoria, Not a Brownie is just as surreal, especially with the spacy breakdown in the middle. Paweł Betley’s flute flits over drummer Jakub Tolak’s steady Penny Lane beat throughout the cheery Warsaw Summer. Frozen Heartland could be ELO in a particularly lush, wistful moment, circa 1977: “Come back!” is the mantra.

Rising from a blippy bounce to far more serious, Dragon is a knowing parable about the kind of big, unexpected payoff that you might encounter if you keep your mind open. The band go back to a carnivalesque pulse for the album’s fleeting title track, then blend pouncing Bowie rock with crazed atmospherics in Viral Spiral.

Białota’s Rhodes mingles uneasily with the simmering guitars in Blurred, a portrait of a superman which may have sarcastic political subtext. Ola Bilińska sings the miniature Mysteries in the Sky over a twinkling backdrop of electric piano and lush acoustic guitars. Then the band pick up the pace with QRMA, shifting between watery chorus-box-driven late Beatles and skittish glamrock.

Palmer intones an eco-disaster warning over a deep-space soundscape in Goodbye Gaia. Mother Mars is a logical segue, a broodingly waltzing art-rock anthem: if the White Kites got it right, we’re looking at Life on Mars, or bust. They wind up the album with the slow, immersive, guardedly hopeful ballad Fallen Star. The level of craft and subtle detail on this album is even more amazing considering how rock albums are made these days – and how few of them have been released this year.

Soundwalk Collective and Patti Smith Salute an Influential, Psychedelic French Author

Over a triptych of albums, Soundwalk Collective and Patti Smith have explored the work of three defiantly individualistic French writers: Antonin Artaud, Arthur Rimbaud, and now, René Daumal. The primary inspiration for the collaboration’s latest and concluding chapter, Peradam – streaming at Bandcamp – is Daumal’s final, unfinished 1944 surrealist work Mount Analogue: a Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing. The album title references the philosopher’s stone in Daumal’s narrative, which is visible only to the truly enlightened.

In keeping with the rest of the records, this one features both found sounds and musical performances. Septuagenarian Sherpa Dhan Singh Rana sings the opening number, Nanda Devi a-cappella in his native vernacular over sounds of wind off the Himalayan mountain. Smith narrates the title track over Tenzin Choegyal‘s singing bowls and spare, hypnotically loopy percussion. “The gateway to the invisible must be visible; the gateway to the visible must be invisible,” she observes.

Knowledge of the Self features Anoushka Shankar’s lingering sitar: she has a distant connection to Daumal, as he went on American tour with her uncle, dancer Uday Shankar. “Your fondest theories vanish before the wall of appearances, that veil of colored shapes, sounds…this is where you started, but you chose the wrong door, instead you fell asleep at the threshold and dreamed your beliefs about the world ” Smith intones in Spiritual Death, a gnomic, Gurdjieff-like challenge to seek enlightenment.

Charlotte Gainsbourg half-whispers The Four Cardinal Times in Daumal’s original French over jungly nocturnal sounds and atmospheric keys from either the group’s Stephan Crasneanscki or Simone Merli. Smith offers an English translation of this shaman in action, which continues with greater detail over temple bells in Hymn to the Liquid.

Anoushka Shankar returns for Vera, a strangely murky tableau. Smith’s poem The Rat, an eco-disaster parable, closes the album over ambient samples and a bassy thud. This album doesn’t have the chilling intensity of the ensemble’s previous Rimbaud tribute; then again, it wasn’t meant to.

Allstar Jazz Crew the Analog Players Society Slink Into Psychedelic Territory

The Analog Players Society live up their name in a way: they definitely are players. Check out this lineup: Donny McCaslin on tenor sax, Orrin Evans on piano, Dezron Douglas and Ben Rubin splitting the bass duties and Eric McPherson on drums. With officially sanctioned gigs hard to find outside of Sweden, they’ve joined the brave few making new records these days. Their three-song ep Tilted – streaming at Bandcamp – is the first in a planned two-part series and it’s actually like nothing you would expect from this an allstar cast. Is this lounge music? Psychedelia? Trip-hop? Acid jazz? Postbop? All of the above – and it’s not totally analog either.

They open it with a twelve-minute version of Jobim’s One Note Samba. McCaslin starts out airy and wary over Evans’ judiciously expanding modalities, then brings his echo pedal into the mix while McPherson introduces some slinky funk. They bring it down to a mutedly dancing, hypnotic bass solo while McPherson edges into trip-hop, Evans suddenly breaking the mesmeric mood with tinkling phantasmagoria. One of those “this is why we love jazz” moments.

Evans opens the second number, a wry reinvention titled Epistrophe, on toy piano, as McPherson more or less loops a New Orleans funk riff. McCaslin figures out echo effects both analog and digital over the circular groove. Evans’ restraint and commitment to keeping the mood going with just a handful of sudden “are you awake” riffs is pretty amazing for a guy with his chops. Taking Monk tunes apart and reducing them to most basic terms is fun!   

For now, the final cut is Freedom is But a Fraction of Humanity, the quartet fading up into misterioso, triangulated piano/bass/drums polyrhythms before McCaslin expands beyond uneasy loopiness, only to back away for Evans’ darkly glittery cascades. Everything coalesces over a spring-loaded, rumbling groove: then everybody backs down for a whispery bass solo as McPherson finds the clave with his woodblock and Evans pedals his upper-register chords. This is a very fun and often very funny album.

Revisiting One of the Zeros’ Defining Bedroom Albums

Today is all about zeros nostalgia. Since nostalgia is the enemy of history, let’s put this in historical context. Goldfrapp’s third album Supernature came out in 2005. There wasn’t much to celebrate that year, globally speaking. The Bush regime was dropping thousands of tons of depleted uranium on Iraq, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians and dooming generations to a plague of birth defects. Harvard sophomore Mark Zuckerberg was scheming up ways to turn his campus photoblogging service into the world’s most dangerous surveillance system. But at least Napster was still going strong, opening up a world of music that millions around the world never would have discovered otherwise.

To commemorate the fifteenth anniversary of the album’s initial release, it’s been remastered and reissued on green gatefold vinyl, and you can hear it at Spotify. Throughout the record, singer Alison Goldfrapp’s breathy vocals have been left as sultry as they were on the original release, although Will Gregory’s many layers of simple, catchy, playfully psychedelic keys seem more balanced, less dancefloor-oriented than on the cd.

Revisiting the album, the influence of early 80s new wave acts like Missing Persons, Yaz and early Madonna is more vivid than ever. And the songs are a trip, from Ride a White Horse, the duo’s thinly veiled ecstasy anthem, to Number 1, the motorik New Order ripoff that closes the record. In between, the duo’s frontwoman shows off her upper registers in You Never Know (a song that would be autotuned if it was released by a corporate label in 2020), descends to a seductive whisper in the loopy Let It Take You and purrs over the catchy synth bass in Fly Me Away.

Who can forget the cheery, completely deadpan Slide In? If you were around back then, maybe you slid in or smoked up to the woozy, P-Funkesque textures of Coco, the pogo-sticking Satin Chic or the drifty, oscillating Time Out From the World. In the time since, the two have stayed together – and why wouldn’t they? Their New York shows over the past several years have gotten more and more stratospherically expensive.

The album gets extra points for its effectiveness as a weapon to get noisy neighbors to shut up. Played on a sufficiently powerful system, those icy, bassy electronic beats really cut through the the walls and ceiling.

Obscure Heavy Psychedelia Rescued From Vietnam War-Era Obscurity – For the Tenth Time

The great thing about the Brown Acid compilations is that there are a ton of unbelievable rare treasures amid the obscure singles by marginally talented bands who did their best to imitate Cream, Led Zep, the MC5 or Uriah Heep. Yet while pretty much all these bands rescured from obscurity over the course of the series’ ten volumes sound high on one thing or another, ultimately they have one thing in common: they embraced freedom.

All but one of the songs on the new anthology Brown Acid: The Tenth Trip – streaming at Riding Easy Records – were made in the US during the Vietnam War. The privileged kids whose parents could afford to put them through college to escape the draft weren’t making music that sounded much like this. Acid rock was a working-class subculture, created by musicians who were in danger of being drafted into a war that virtually all of them opposed. There’s only one overtly political song on this record, but let’s not forget that songs which openly endorsed drug use identifed their makers as subversive. This music was more radical than most people today realize.

The first track, Tensions, is by Flint, Michigan band Sounds Synonymous. With slinky organ and fuzztone guitar, it’s basically a one-chord jam  til the chorus. The haphazard doublespeed outro is a classic 1969 stoner touch.

Instead of accelerating, Louisville’s Conception follow a similar pattern with their 1969 single Babylon, with cheap amps, a phaser and a slow blues jam that appears out of nowhere. California band Ralph Williams and the Wright Brothers’ Never Again is a hard blues recorded in mono – three years later.

Atlanta band Bitter Creek’s 1970 recording Plastic Thunder has MC5 snarl and ominous lyrics that reflect the turbulence of the era: it’s one of the album’s best songs. New Orleans group Rubber Memory’s All Together – a ramshackle Vietnam War plea for solidarity – is one of the longscale gems these anthologies are best know for, slinking along with fuzztone bass, wah-wah scratch guitar, and a bridge from nowhere to basically nowhere as well.

First State Bank put out the impressively multitracked, scampering riff-rocker Mr. Sun in that same year. The album’s lone novelty song, Brothers and One’s Hard On Me is a pretty obvious dirty joke (say the title slowly and you’ll get it).

Tucson’s Frozen Sun contribute a Hendrix ripoff with super-spacy lyrics, followed by the album’s most hilarious song, The Roach, a 1969 stoner classic by Alabama band the Brood. “Leave him around for when you begin to come down,” their singer rasps over wahs and organ and a weird white noise loop: is that supposed to be somebody toking hard?.

The album’s final cut is Tabernash’s Head Collect, a surreal 1969 mashup of the Beatles and mid-60s Pretty Things.

It’s unthinkable that any of the bands in the ten-album series could have made this music while wearing masks and standing six feet from each other. Folks, this lockdown bullshit is never going to end unless we put an end to it. It’s time to mobilize.

Surreal, Entertaining, Strangely Cinematic Themes on Curtis Hasselbring’s New Album

Curtis Hasselbring may be best known as one of the mostly highly sought-after trombonists in the New York jazz scene, but he also plays a lot of other instruments. As a guitarist, he has a very distinctive, jagged style and impeccable taste in late 70s/early 80s postpunk and new wave. He’s been involved with innumerable projects over the years, but his most psychedelic one is Curha, his mostly one-man band. Hasselbring’s music has always been defined by his sense of humor, but this is where you’ll find some of his funniest songs. The brand-new Curha II album is streaming at Bandcamp.

The opening track, Casa Grande is a tongue-in-cheek surf tune with neatly intertwining guitars and keening funeral organ, Dan Reiser supplying a low-key beach-party beat. He sticks around for the second track, Togar, an outer-space Motown theme, guest guitarist Brandon Seabrook mimicking the squiggle of the keys.

Hasselbring keeps the sci-fi sonics going in Sick of Ants!: listen closely to the watery guitar and you’ll catch his appreciation for the late, great John McGeoch of Siouxsie & the Banshees and PiL. How airy is Blimp Enthusiast, a rare vocal number? Not particularly, but this quasi trip-hop song is very funny.

The blippy Blaster comes across as a motorik tv theme on whippits. With its loopy low-register piano and clip-clop beats, Soap makes even less sense until Peter Hess’ bass clarinet ushers in a somber mood for a second. Hasselbring’s trombone appears distinctly for the first time in Murgatroid, a clever mashup of 70s disco, outer-space theme and early new wave.

With its intricately dancing web of guitar multitracks, the rather disquieting MMS has echoes of early 80s Robert Fripp; then Hasselbring takes it further toward acid jazz. He goes back to lo-fi motorik minimalism with Totally Hired, then shifts toward spare, 90s electro-lounge with History of Vistas.

He closes the album with the coyly tiptoeing Her Pebble Fusion and then Blown Bubble Blues, which is kind of obvious but irresistibly fun. Hip-hop artists in need of far-out samples need look no further. You don’t have to be high to enjoy this, but it couldn’t hurt.

Lusciously Dark Heavy Psychedelia From Solace

For more than two decades, Solace have bridged the gap between doom metal, art-rock and stoner boogie as well as any other band on the planet. There’s an awful lot going on in their songs, way beyond any kind of simple verse/chorus pattern. Just when things start to look grimmest, they like to pick up the pace, with lots of false endings. Their latest album The Brink is streaming at Bandcamp.

They get off to an epic start with Breaker of the Way, the punchy riff-rock of the verse rising to a macabre peak infused with frontman Justin Goins’ smoky organ on the chorus. The doublespeed interlude midway through is a welcome jolt of extra fight-or-flight.

Desert Coffin is slow and loopy, until the chromatic crush of the chorus kicks in: there’s no predicting Tommy Southard and Justin Daniels’ funny cop/evil cop twin guitar solo midway through. Dead Sailor’s Dream comes across as a cruel riff-rock imitation of a sea chantey, with distant echoes of both Sabbath and Hendrix.

The anti-conformity anthem Waste People is so savagely catchy that you don’t realize that it’s mostly just one chord, until they finally reach a nebulous art-rock chorus. Are they going to to doublespeed for the guitar duel afterward? Not this time.

The whole band – guitars, organ, Rob Hultz’s bass and Tim Schoenleber’s drums – lock in on the big, menacing chromatic riff that anchors The Light Is a Lie, then the stampede finally begins. The twin-guitar attack and sheer catchiness of Crushing Black bring it closer to prime Iron Maiden than most anything else here.

Bird of Ill Omen, built around a chilling Balkan-tinged riff, is their Powerslave. It isn’t just the best song on the album, it’s one of the best songs of the year, capped off with a long, searing twin guitar solo. They go back to sea chantey territory, mashing it up with brooding 19th century gospel, for the mostly acoustic interlude Shadows Fade.

That sets up the album’s title track and its bludgeoning blues riffage: it could be a classic early 70s Blue Oyster Cult epic with crunchier guitars. Finally, five and a half minutes in, we get a scream from Goins! The band take a detour toward brisk vintage Judas Priest with Until the Last Dog Is Hung and reprise Dead Sailor’s Dream with a much more unhinged sway to close the record: the ending is too good to give away. Watch for this on the best albums of the year page if we make it that far.

Iron Rider Play Sludgy Sounds to Get Lost In

Stoner metal band Iron Rider’s album Wondering If You’re in Hell By Now is streaming at Bandcamp. It’s basically a heavy metal sonata, a simple, crushing theme and variations. It’s also especially sludgy: the bass will rattle your walls if you have something other than a phone to play this on and you turn it up loud enough.

Julian Agneta’s distorted, downtuned bass pushes the opening instrumental, I’ll Find You, from sludgy, hypnotic riff-rock to a hazy boogie. They don’t bother to budge out of that same key until the slowly swaying Drifter is more than half over: nice long scream from frontman/guitarist Mark Grillo after the first verse!

He takes the distortion off for the forlorn intro to An Old Low, then brings it back when the crackling bass enters the picture and completely dominates the lows: the momentary sheets of guitar distortion that rip the sound from an unexpectedly quiet, stygian interlude are a sweet touch.

They segue from there into the ominous instrumental Bonfire. Then they pick up the pace with drummer Michael Livathinopoulos’ surprisingly spring-loaded groove in Beg, its doomy interludes and Iommi-ish guitar multitracks. There’s another segue into the album’s final, best and most gloomily chromatic cut, Justice. In a style where players sometimes noodle aimlessly, this band’s incisive riffage and interesting textures – what the hell is that wah they’re running the guitar through, for example? – are a breath of fresh air.

A Surreal Psychedelic Rock Rediscovery From 1970

As the world first started to discover shortly after youtube went online, the big record labels’ history of music was a big lie. Here in the US, Kasey Kasem’s American Top 40 and the Billboard Magazine charts only told a small portion of the story. There were thousands and thousands of bands and artists who never had a hit record – or never even made a record – who still made a big impact on their home turf. One of those bands was Ice.

They came out of Indianapolis in the late 60s, sounding like no other group on the planet – except early Spinal Tap, if that band had been real. The lead instrumentalist on most of their songs was organist Barry Crawford. Their more riff-oriented songs bring to mind Spooky Tooth, but Ice were a lot more than your typical proto-metal band. Their vocal harmonies reveal an early BeeGees influence. One of their singers affects a raspy ersatz blues delivery. Their lyrics can be ludicrously funny. And the song titles pretty much speak for themselves: Running High; I Can See Her Flying; He Rides Among Clouds.

Ice released their lone full-length album, The Ice Age, in 1970. Riding Easy Records has just reissued it – on vinyl of course, and you can hear it on their album page. It’s easy to see why none of the major labels were interested in this band: their music is wildly original, veering from one style to another. Take the first track, Gypsy, with its simple wave-motion hook, jangly Byrds twelve-string guitars and smoky Procol Harum organ. It could be a sarcastic look at anomie in a dead-end town, or something less ambitious. It has absolutely nothing to do with Romany people.

Satisfy is a total Spinal Tap moment. Set to a chugging Spencer Davis Group vamp, it’s about a guy who lives for being onstage, bitching about all the time he has to spend away from it. 3 O’Clock in the Morning could be the Move taking a stab at Penny Lane Beatles, punctuated by lead guitarist John Schaffer’s keening slide riffs and haphazard blues over torrential organ.

Frontman/bassist Jim Lee’s slithery slides punctuate rhythm guitarist Richard Strange’s simmering, cheap tube amp chords in Copper Penny – the attempt at a jam midway through is hilarious. Drummer Mike Saligoe adds a light-fingered, marching touch to Catch You, a pop song with a couple of bluesy electric harpsichord solos.

Running High turns out to be the heaviest, most toothsomely spooky number here. I Can See Her Flying seems to be an attempt at Memphis soul. They follow that with the bizarrely rising and falling Run to Me: “Every day of my lonely life, I wish I had a wife,” is the lyrical highlight.

He Rides Among Clouds is religious: by the time the song is over, this messiah’s “heavy beard” has earned not one but three mentions! The album ends with the catchy organ-driven instrumental Song of the East – does this mean that the band met the guy with the heavy beard and found nirvana, or dharma, or whatever that is? No, just take another hit, you probably need one after all this.

Fun fact: during their brief lifespan, Ice managed to open “for national acts like Three Dog Night, [Detroit MC5 contemporaries] SRC, Kenny Rogers & the First Edition, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and others.”

Disquieting, Enveloping, Psychedelically Layered Sonics From Lord Buffalo

What was this haunting, savagely layered one-chord epic with a weird, possibly Pacific Island title doing on the hard drive here? Turns out that it’s Raziel, the seven-minute opening track on Austin band Lord Buffalo‘s latest album Tohu Wa Bohu, streaming at Bandcamp. They like slow, menacing themes; they don’t change chords much but they make them interesting.

That particular song is the missing link between the Friends of Dean Martinez’s southwesern gothic and Mogwai’s grim, cold concrete council estate tableaux. Through D.J. Pruitt and G.J. Heilman’s layers of guitars over the slow, steady beat, the heathaze is impenetrable, and frontman Pruitt makes that clear. But he holds out hope, dodging shards of reverb as they filter through the mix.

The band pick up the pace, building to a steady stroll with Wild Hunt, which has two chords, smoky sax, Brockett Hamilton’s piano and a Nick Cave influence along with the guitar torture. Troubled music for troubled times.

“This is the night, she don’t need nothing at all,” Pruitt intones, cold and deadpan, as the third track, Halle Berry gets underway, jagged quasi-funk guitars over a murky slink. Very early 90s New York gutter blues, a slower take on the Chrome Cranks maybe.

Dog Head comes across as a strung-out blues take on Joy Division’s The Eternal. “Be careful, you don’t know this song,” Pruitt warns as Patrick Patterson’s violin joins the guitars and the cloud congeals to toxic density. The title track is a slow, loopy mashup of jagged 70s no wave and early Dream Syndicate.

Cicadas cry, vehicles break down and night looms in all too soon in Kenosis, a mashup of understated Oxygen Ponies menace and sunbaked My Education atmospherics leavened with tinkly vibraphone and piano. The band open Heart of the Snake as a venomous take on an early 60s summer-house theme, then bring in creepy layers of organ and guitars: Alec K. Redfearn‘s work comes to mind. They segue from there into the loopy, careening Llano Estacado to wrap up the album in a ball of flame. You might ask why, in a time where we need to focus on shutting down the tech Nazis who keep flipping the script behind the lockdown, that it makes any sense at all to listen to something this amorphous and escapist. Hey, we all could use a break right about now.