Tantalizingly Heavy Freebies from Riding Easy Records

In 2021, record labels are like video stores were twenty years ago. Riding Easy Records are the rare label who have managed to carve out a successful niche – in all things heavy. Stoner boogie, doom metal, psychedelia, biker rock, they’ve got you covered. Their Xmas 2020 mixtape – a free download at Bandcamp – is an obvious ploy to get you to stock up on their vinyl. And practically everything they put out is worth owning on vinyl, as this playlist confirms.

There’s an insane amount of music here, seventeen tracks. Some of these acts are well known, others less so, and many have received coverage here. Take the Goners, who mash up psychedelic garage rock with metal riffs and whose album Good Mourning recently got the thumbs-up. They’re represented by the album’s most bizarre track, Down and Out, a blend of Ventures and early Iron Maiden with a spacy interlude for horns. Go figure.

Here Lies Man, an Antibalas spinoff who metalize Afrobeat, open the mix with I Told You (You Shall Die), a killer minor-key number that could be a heavier Budos Band with a mellotron. Lake, by Spelljammer, has brisk fuzz-and-wah bookending the surprisingly slinky sludge in between. Warish‘s hammering Say to Please looks back to Queens of the Stone Age, while Deathchant‘s Holy Roller is a surreal mashup of heavy 70s boogie, screamo and hip-hop.

Alator’s Lost and Never Found has vintage Sabbath gloom and catchiness, plus a cool funeral organ solo. Biker rock band the Death Wheelers earned a good Halloween month review with their latest album, whose title track is the chugging faux-bikesploitation theme Divine Filth. Death Is Coming, by R.I.P., is a more 70s-oriented throwback to Bon Scott-era AC/DC and Judas Priest.

Hellfire‘s Victims moves forward in time about seven or eight years to the new wave of British heavy metal and Iron Maiden, whose catchiest, poppiest side they emulate. Headbang, by Rapid Tears, and the Mopptops’ Our lives are pretty standard-issue Nuggets garage nostalgia at slightly higher volume

The ersatz Hendrix of Randy Holden’s Blue My Mind appears on the reissue of the former Blue Cheer guitarist’s extremely rare 1970 vinyl debut, Population II. First State Bank’s lysergically multitracked Mr. Sun and Debb Johnson’s politically volatile heavy soul single Dancing in the Ruin are also 70s rarities digitized and resurrected on the latest volume in the popular Brown Acid compilation series – they’re up to eleven now, just like Spinal Tap. And Gypsy, by Indianapolis psychedelic band Ice, is the strangest rediscovery here, a bizarre riff-rock tune with hints of the Moody Blues and the Move. Riding Easy Records reissued their lone, similarly surreal 1970 album, The Ice Age, last June.

Thomas V. Jager, frontman of Monolord, contributes The Bitter End, a lo-fi gothic ballad evoking a well-known Animals hit. The album’s final cut seems to be a stoner joke: no spoilers. Download and enjoy.

Blue Oyster Cult on the Highway Out of Hell

The Man and the Boy pushed the shopping cart slowly down the empty Road. Inside, under the two solar panels the Man had found at an abandoned lumber yard, were their clothes and a bunch of canned goods. It was all they had room for. He’d hooked up the panels to his phone, not because there was any phone service anymore, or anyone he knew to call if he could, but for the music on it. He’d found a cable splitter in the burnt-out rubble of a phone store so that each could listen with both ears. The Man didn’t often do that: he had to listen for other people, to be ready on a second’s notice to get off the Road and cover up.

“What does this remind you of?” the Man asked the Boy, hopefully. The song that was playing was This Ain’t the Summer of Love, from the album Blue Oyster Cult Live at Rock of Ages Festival, July 30th 2016. You could stream it at Spotify before the lockdowners had shut that service down. And then the whole web went down. And then most of the world. The Man and the Boy hadn’t seen people in a month.

“The verse sounds like Steve Wynn. The chorus sounds like the Stones,” the Boy replied.

He’d learned well!

The Man cursed himself for not loading more old favorites onto the phone: almost everything was new, or relatively new, from since the time he’d bought it. All the same, he’d tried to construct a history of music from the albums and tracks he had. When the two first hit the Road, he’d made sure to give the Boy a lesson every day. Too bad there wasn’t any Bach organ music. The Boy had suffered in silence through the St. Matthew Passion and the Klavierubung on piano. But he seemed to dig Rachmaninoff, and Shostakovich, especially the String Quartet No. 8 which the Man had forgotten was on the phone. Played by an obscure quartet, but still plenty chilling.

Trouble was, there was hardly any hip-hop, no country, not much blues, and trying to interest the Boy in jazz turned out to be a lost cause.

The Boy liked metal.

Good thing there was plenty of that, starting with a weird bunch of bands playing Sabbath covers and a solid Metallica mix. So far they’d burned through Q5, Black Swan, Wovenhand, Heavy Temple, Solace and Firebreather, and they were on BOC now.

The Man had left all his records, including the first ten BOC albums, behind at the house, and he resolved to fix that after they got off the Road, further south where it was warmer. He’d find another house, hopefully with no decaying corpses in it, another abandoned Home Depot, get some more panels, and rig up a real stereo. And build a still, and find a truck with a stick shift that would start if you pushed it fast enough. And maybe someday they’d go back to the old house, running on alcohol since all of the gas stations were empty now, and collect all the vinyl.

That was down the Road, though. Right now they had to get south enough to where they wouldn’t freeze to death if it snowed. That would take a couple of months, and it was already September.

“What’s up with the can of beer?” the Boy wanted to know. The song was The Golden Age of Leather.

“That’s a toast. And something for the band to engage the crowd with. You remember when we went to see Metallica, how people would raise their lighters? Same deal but with beer.”

“I don’t like this,” the Boy told the Man. “They play the same thing over and over again.”

The Man didn’t tell the Boy how people who were high when they heard this liked it that way. “Wait til you hear the original version, when we get situated and get all my vinyl down with us.”

“What song does this sound like?” the Boy wanted to know. In an off-key falsetto, he sang a famous 60s pop riff: “I love the ‘something, something’ she wears.”

“That’s the Beach Boys,” the Man replied. “You like the Beach Boys?” he asked, quizzically.

“I hate the Beach Boys. The Beach Girls,” the Boy sneered.

The Man was hopeful. The Boy rarely spoke anymore. Any sign of engagement with the world was a good thing. Everything had been looking up until his mother had taken the vaccine, and six months later, the immune deficiency had reared its ugly, inevitable head, and then she was dead.

As the Man and the Boy reached a hill, the blackened shell of a hospital stood stark against the sky, over the trees. First the lockdowners had vaccinated the doctors and the nurses to kill them off so they could use the hospitals as death camps. Because the National Guard had rebelled and refused to vaccinate people, the Australians had been called in. The lockdowners had shut down the food industry there, so the only way an Australian could eat was to join Trace and Track, or the vaccine army and go to the UK or the US. That’s when the Resistance started burning hospitals and liberating everyone who’d been locked up there, accused of carrying the virus. But it was too late. They’d all been vaccinated, at gunpoint, and they died off fast.

Apppropriately enough, the song that was playing was Burning For You. “You like this one?” the Man asked the Boy.

“It’s ok. What’s a b-side?”

“It’s the flip side of a single. You remember those 45 records your mom had? You know, the ones with the big hole in the middle? Those are singles. The b-side is the song on the other side. It’s not usually as good as the one on the a-side.” The Man kicked himself. Talking about his dead wife was something they’d come to avoid. He hoped the Boy wouldn’t go back into his shell.

“You wait til you hear the album version. Killer guitar solo. That’s Buck Dharma. The rest of the band here is mostly a bunch of replacements, but he’s one of the original guys. Him and the singer. Eric Bloom,” he explained.

And silently resolved to turn the Boy on to the album version of OD’d on Life Itself, too. That was the next song. This version didn’t have that insane peak, where the lead guitar comes spiraling out of the bridge. Here it was haphazard, jagged, not bad, but not something that would rip your face off the first time you heard it.

The Road
Oh, the unwindingness of it all
As if from Barraclough to the pubs of Ulster
A metaphor, yea
A simile
A conundrum

Whoah, stop right there.

Where did that awful Irish poetry come from? Nix that.

Now where were we?

The band were five tracks into their set by now and the song was a relatively new one, Harvest Moon. A backbeat tune. The Boy hummed along with the riff to All Along the Watchtower, then played air guitar when the twin solo kicked in. This kid had good ears, the Man reminded himself.

ME262 was the next song. The Man didn’t say anything about how it was on the slow side, or how the cynicism had been reduced to phony barrelhouse piano and doot-doot backing vocals. Just wait til you hear the original, he promised the Boy, silently.

The Boy did air guitar again for Buck’s Boogie. “It’s kind of like ZZ Top, huh?” he asked.

“Blue Oyster Cult blows away anything ZZ Top ever did,” the Man snorted. Still, this had gotten the kid’s attention. Good thing there was a bunch of BOC on the phone.

The Boy scrunched up his face and bobbed his head for Lips in the Hills. A deep cut with the creepy feel of the band’s classic 70s era, the Man thought. Forty-five years after they started, still going strong. If only I last that long.

Then Came the Last Days of May was next. About halfway through the first verse, a phone rang. The man whipped off his headphones. “Did you hear that? he asked the Boy.

“Yeah,” the Boy said, suddenly energized. “I didn’t think there was phone service anymore.”

The Man picked up the line. No signal. He restarted the song, and sure enough, there was a ringtone on it. Somebody in the band had forgotten to turn his phone off before he went onstage.

The two fell silent, through a weird, spacy Richie Castellano synth solo and the point where drummer Jules Radino and bassist Danny Miranda took the song doublespeed as they always did. The end of the guitar solo, the band really cooking by now, jarred the two road warriors out of their funk.

“Cool solo,” the Boy remarked. “Is this an old song?”

“Really old,” the Man replied. “First album. They always played it this way, real fast, when I used to go see them.”

“Do you think there will ever be concerts again?” the Boy asked.

“Oh yeah,” the Man responded, projecting as much casual confidence as he could. “As soon as we meet other people…”

“…Who aren’t cannibals,” the Boy interrupted.

“Yeah, who aren’t cannibals,” the Man concurred, picturing the headless infant cooked over a spit that they’d stumbled over a couple of weeks before. That was why they had to be careful, to keep one ear on the music and the other on the Road.

On their earbuds, the band had launched into Godzilla. It wasn’t that heavy, the Man told himself; the Boy picked up on the Led Zep quote. The apple obviously hadn’t fallen very far.

Don’t Fear the Reaper was the last song, a long, surprisingly fresh version. “Are you afraid of dying?” the Boy asked the Man.

“Nah,” the Man replied, hoping the blitheless in his voice would rub off. “But we aren’t going to die. We’re going to get off this Road and pick up where we left off. The old normal. No New Abnormal, right?”

“No New Abnormal, yeah,” the Boy replied. On the Boy’s lips, the Man glimpsed a flicker of a smile.

[Apologies to Cormac McCarthy, whose book would have been a lot better without all the extraneous attempts at poetry.]

A Creepy, Trippy Maxi-Single For a Creepy Year From Scorpio 70

“People are eating people now,” drummer Guy Bibi observes about ten minutes into Scorpio 70’s new “horror motorik spacerock” soundscape, Space Madness, streaming at Bandcamp.

From a distance, it reminds of the most vast segments of 17 Pygmies’ classic album Celestina, one of the most haunting outer space psychedelic albums ever made.

This one takes a long time to get going. Keyboardist Yair Etziony sets the stage with his layers of blips and twisted radio transmissions. Eventually guitarist Barry Berko joins the picture, sparely and warily over the dirgelike wave motion that rises behind him. Bassist Benjamin Esterlis finally introduces a slow dub reggae pulse before the music decays to a slowly turning vortex again. 

Guitarist Kurt Leege Reinvents Jazz Classics As Envelopingly Ambient, Richly Psychedelic Soundscapes

There’s considerable irony in that Kurt Leege, one of the most interesting guitarists in all of ambient music, first made his mark as a feral lead player, beginning with Curdlefur, then Noxes Pond and finally System Noise, New York’s best art-rock band of the zeros. Leege’s new album Sleepytime Jazz – streaming at Bandcamp – is his second solo release, a similarly celestial follow-up to his 2018 record Sleepytime Guitar, where he reinvented old folk tunes and spirituals as lullabies.

This one is calm, elegant, drifty music with a subtle, soulful edge, a mix of jazz classics from John Coltrane, to Miles Davis, to Herbie Hancock and Louis Armstrong. Leege layers these tracks meticulously, typically using his ebow to build a deep-space wash and then adding terse, thoughtful, often strikingly dynamic multitracks overhead. This may be on the quiet side, but it’s also incredibly psychedelic. Play it at low volume if you feel like drifting off; crank it and discover the beast lurking deep within.

Blue in Green has spiky, starry chords and resonant David Gilmour-like phrases fading deep into spacious, hypnotically echoing ebow vastness. Leege has always been a connoisseur of the blues, and that cuts through – literally – in At Last, his spare, gentle but incisive single-note lines over the starry resonance behind him. And Coltrane’s Spiritual is much the same, and even more starkly bluesy: shine on you distant diamond.

Georgia on My Mind comes across as opiated Wes Montgomery with distant Memphis soul echoes. Herbie Hancock’s Maiden Voyage could be a particularly immersive, atmospheric interlude by 70s art-rock cult favorites Nektar.

Leege reinvents My Funny Valentine, artfully shifting up the metrics with equal parts Pink Floyd grandeur and Bill Frisell tenderness. He hits waltz time even more head-on in his version of Naima, the fastest and most hauntingly direct of all these slow numbers.

Neferititi, appropriately, is the album’s most delicate and hypnotic piece. The echoes come in waves most noticeably throughout Tenderly, tersely layered from top to bottom. And Leege’s take of What a Wonderful World is as anthemic as it is warmly enveloping. What a gorgeous record. It’s a real find for fans of jazz, ambient music, psychedelic rock, or for that matter anyone who just wants to escape to a comforting sonic cocoon

Elephant Tree’s Stygian, Smoldering Set in Brooklyn Last Year Immortalized on a New Album

The Day of Doom Live series – featuring the bands who played last year’s festival of dark psychedelic rock at St. Vitus in Greenpoint – continues today with a crushing set by Elephant Tree, streaming at Bandcamp. The British four-piece have more of a sense of humor than most of the bands who play dead-serious heavy psychedelic sounds: listen closely for a couple of great WTF moments.  Said it before, time to say it again: more bands should make live albums, and this is a prime example why.

The groups on the bill weren’t all doom metal acts, either, although Elephant Tree’s stygian fuzztone attack is more evilly chromatic than, say, Horsehunter. They open with Aphotic Blues, which isn’t particularly bluesy but it is anthemic and and hypnotic, the twin guitars of Jack Townley and John Slattery over the heavy sway of bassist Peter Holland and drummer Sam Hart.

The band follow a similar pattern – octaves and simple, sharp blues riffs – in Dawn, with a couple of fat, sustained guitar solos and a goofy wah bass break. The riffage gets slurrier and the guitar strings bend achingly in Wither, down to a bass-and-drums interlude that could be Joy Division at halfspeed.

The textures get fuzzier and denser in Surma, with its downtuned bass intro. Then the group roar and shriek but also get surprisingly quiet for a minimalist bass solo midway through In Suffering.

Likewise, they shift from fuzztone crunch to spare, gloomy folk noir and finally some icy spacerock in the longest song of the set, Attack of the Altaica. They drift through the end of the set with the windswept art-rock waltz Circles, Slattery’s piano awash in a haze of reverb. Much as this is plenty enjoyable to listen to on headphones, wouldn’t it be great to be able to actually be at St. Vitus to feel the bass rattling the roof? In that sweet spot about ten feet past the sound booth, along the wall where the bands stash their gear? Are we really going to resign ourselves to raising a generation of kids who will never experience a blissful moment like that?

The Kolotov Mocktails Play Dynamic, Interesting, Subtly Amusing Cross-Genre Instrumentals

As you would imagine, instrumental jamband the Kolotov Mocktails have a sense of humor. The mocktail part of the band might be a characteristically wry admission of how many styles and ideas they appropriate; and yet, they are absolutely unique. Their songs tend to be upbeat, the solos are purposeful and the tunes are catchy. Their latest album Ivy Hall is streaming at Spotify.

They open with Between the Ranges, a lively Grateful Dead-style instrumental by drummer Rob McKendrick. Violinist George Mason’s wildly spiraling solo is a highlight; the southern rock quotes at the end are predictably amusing.

Mason and pedal steel player Dave Easley take centerstage in Dancing on the Wall, McKendrick and bassist John Lang giving it a tight jazz waltz beat. Lang contributes Mr. Pants Pants, which could be the Alan Parsons Project with a more organic groove, guest Allan Walters’ Scottish smallpipes mingling with the layers of keys.

Easley contributes A Visit to the Zoo: with his percussive hammer-ons and ambiguously lingering lines, along with Mason’s long, moody solo, this seems to reflect the inhabitants’ unease rather than a joyous family outing. The shift toward a marching raga, with Mason on guitar sitar, makes for an unexpected coda.

The group shift back toward newgrass rock with Acoustic Alchemy, a brisk number in an Old Crow Medicine Show vein. Fueled by Lang’s strutting, circling bassline, Coming to an Alley Near You is a bizarrely entertaining mashup of Jean-Luc Ponty, Kraftwerk and maybe Dave Tronzo in a particularly terse moment. Likewise, imagine Ponty trying his hand at Meters funk in, say, 1974 – with a pedal steel – and you get The Fuzz.

Mason and Easley trade punchy riffs in Raw Eel Sheets, a similarly mind-warping blend of Django Reinhardt and New Orleans funk. The Crack of Noon features Walters on the pipes again: it could be a Greer Coppins tune, or the Dead taking a stab at a highlands air. The band segue from there to close the record with Time Ebbing: the guitar/violin duel is pure Terrapin Station. If you smell something skunky and smoky coming from under your neighbor’s door, it might be this album.

Get Lost in Domkraft’s Day of Doom Live Album

The latest in the Day of Doom Live series – immortalizing the performances at last year’s festival of dark psychedelic rock at St. Vitus in Greenpoint – is Domkraft’s searing set, streaming at Bandcamp. This what separates real musicians from wannabes. Anybody can sound like a million bucks in the studio, but onstage, you have to bring it, and Domkraft don’t disappoint. As with the other bands who played the festival, their influences range beyond metal to sledgehammering postrock and swirilng dreampop.

They get epic right from the start with The Rift, a hypnotic, mostly one-chord jam punctuated by hypnotic, insistent upward waves, guitarist Martin Widholm slowly dialing in the wah to make things even trippier. Bassist/frontman Martin Wegeland’s downtuned axe buzzes behind Widholm’s uneasy resonance as they launch into Through the Ashes, which is more doomy and chromatic, with a gloomy interlude where the guitar drops out midway through.

The tasty, evil riff that opens the studio version of Watchers gets lost here: this is more about dense head-bobbing atmospherics as drummer Anders Dahlgren drives it into doublespeed. But the version of Flood here has more menace and textural bite than the original.

Meltdown of the Orb is the set’s most hypnotic moment, like the early Black Angels at their loudest. They close with Landslide, slowly bringing up the eerie opening riff and then hitting a vikings-in-space groove in 6/8 time.

It should go without saying that nobody wants to live in a world where shows like this are against the law: just ask Domkraft, who come from Sweden, which never locked down this past year. Time to get busy, people: the US Supreme Court handed down a temporary injunction overturning New York dictator Andrew Cuomo’s ban on religious gatherings. Concerts – the kind outside of houses of worship – should be our next order of business!

Horsehunter’s Crushingly Psychedelic Set at Last Year’s Day of Doom Festival Immortalized on a New Live Album

In a stroke of genius, the organizers of the Day of Doom Festival at St. Vitus in Brooklyn last year decided to record it. They’re now releasing the recordings; the first was a wickedly psychedelic set by Summoner. The latest one in the series is Horsehunter’s Day of Doom Live, streaming at Bandcamp. These albums’ sound quality is consistently excellent, no surprise considering the venue’s tremendous PA system.

As these records remind, not all the bands at the festival were straight-up doom metal: the loosely connecting thread was dark psychedelia. Horsehunter have throat-shredding vocals and build immersive, dynamically shifting atmospheres that brings to mind early 80s no wave bands like the Ex and the dreampop of My Bloody Valentine as much as any kind of metal. For a band who can be dangerously loud, they’re sometimes shockingly quiet.

There are only four tracks here: only their first number, Witchery, is less than ten minutes long. They open that one with feedback shrieking from guitarists’ Michael Harutyunyan and Dan Harris’ Flying V and Les Paul, bassist Himi Stringer and drummer Nick Cron building to a hypnotic, enveloping gallop and then a series of bludgeoningly tricky rhythms.

Bring Out Yer Dead, the first of the epics, shifts from a spare, funereal, circling riff to a long series of variations on gritty, thick cinderblock chords. They bring it full circle, hauntingly.

Nuclear Rapture has allusive Sabbath chromatics over an undulating mathrock-tinged sway, an unexpectedly minimalist, low-key funeral march midway through, a tantalizingly brief thicket of machete tremolo-picking and finally a big payoff with a completely haphazard guitar solo.

Decaying for a bit to more sheets of feedback, they segue from there into a practically seventeen-minute version of Stoned to Death to close the set. This is where the doom wafts in, from a syncopated Electric Funeral riff, to a spine-pounding doublespeed break, crazed exchanges of guitar shredding and tarpit atmospherics.

This blog has been agitating for years for artists to release more live albums, considering that it’s infinitely cheaper to record a show than rent studio time. Who else had the presence of mind to record a live set at St. Vitus, or any other good metal venue? Let’s hear it.

Wild, Surreal, Psychedelic Keyboard Mashups From Brian Charette

The latest artist to defiy the odds and put the grim early days of the lockdown to good use is Brian Charette, arguably the most cutting-edge organist in jazz. As you will see on his new solo album, Like the Sun – streaming at his music page – he plays a whole slew of other styles. Challenging himself to compose and improvise against a wild bunch of rhythmic loops in all sorts of weird time signatures, he pulled together one of his most entertaining records. This one’s definitely the most surreal, psychedelic and playful of all of them – and he has made a lot.

Basically, this is a guy alone in his man cave mashing up sounds as diverse as twinkly Hollywood Hills boudoir soul, squiggly dancefloor jams, P-Funk stoner interludes, Alan Parsons Project sine-wave vamps and New Orleans marches, most of them ultimately under the rubric of organ jazz.

At the heart of the opening track, 15 Minutes of Fame lies a catchy gutbucket Hammond organ riff and variations…in this case surrounded by all sorts of warpy textures and strange, interwoven rhythms. Time Piece, the second track, could be a synthy late 70s ELO miniature set to a shuffly drum machine loop, with a rapidfire B3 crescendo.

Slasher is not a horror theme but a reference to a chord with an unusual bass note – as Charette says in his priceless liner notes, “If they can get along, why can’t we?” This one’s basically a soul song without words with some tricky changes.

Honeymoon Phase could be a balmy Earth Wind and Fire ballad, Charette’s layers of keys taking the place of the brass. He builds the album’s title track around an Arabic vocal sample, with all sorts of wry touches surrounding a spacy, catchy theme and variations in 5/8 time.

Mela’s Cha Cha – inspired by Charette’s wife, the electrifyingly multistylistic singer Melanie Scholtz – is what might have happened if George Clinton, Larry Young and Ruben Blades were all in the same room together circa 1983. Three Lights has a warmly exploratory groove over a catchy bassline and a hypnotic syndrum beat.

Break Tune is a rare opportunity to hear Charette play guitar, adding a little Muscle Shoals flavor to this gospel-tinged, Spike Lee-influenced mashup. You might not expect a melody ripped “from a punchy synth brass preset on the Korg Minilogue,” as Charette puts it, or changes influenced by the great Nashville pianist Floyd Cramer in an organ jazz tune, but that’s what Charette is up to in From Like to Love.

Creole is a more traditional number, with a New Orleans-inflected groove and a handful of devious Joni Mitchell quotes. 7th St. Busker, inspired by a cellist playing on the street in the West Village, follows in the same vein but with a strange vocal sample underneath the good-natured, reflective organ solo.

Robot Heart would make a solid hip-hop backing track; Charette closes the record with 57 Chevy, a funky shout-out to Dr. Lonnie Smith, who goes back to that era.

Imaginatively Arranged, Trippy, Artsy Retro Pop Sounds From James Righton

Klaxons keyboardist James Righton most likely has a huge record collection. His new album The Performer – streaming at Bandcamp – is informed by decades of soul and smartly orchestrated pop sounds. The production is elegant, frequently psychedelic and despite all the digitally precise layers, sounds pretty organic. The catchy tunes and artful arrangements are the focus here rather than lyrics or vocals.

The album opens with the title track, which sounds like Roxy Music playing an Oasis song, built around the former’s signature, biting, reverberating Arp electro piano sound but with more of Oasis’ loucheness. The band take it out with a perfect 1974 Country Life-style arrangement, layers of keys and sax hitting a peak.

The second song is titled Edie, but Righton uses her full name throughout this vampy mashup of vintage 70s soul and trippy 90s neosoul. With its strummy acoustic guitar, emphatic riffs from a string section and catchy bassline, See the Monster is the great lost disco track from ELO’s much-maligned but actually fairly respectable Discovery album from 1979.

Devil Is Loose has tasty layers of watery chorus-box guitars over a strutting bassline: the way the bass shifts to that same liquid, echoey tone is very clever. There are two versions of Lessons in Dreamland here. Part 1 is a starry miniature like the ones that Roxy Music would use to fill out an album side. Righton fleshes out the theme as a slow piano ballad with a staggered trip-hop beat to close the record.

Before that, there’s Start, a twinkling, swirly, anthemic art-pop original, not the big punk-funk hit by the Jam. Are You With Me has disorientingly tricky rhythms: at heart, it’s ELO doing a ba-bump Vegas noir pop song. And Heavy Heart is an imaginatively minimalist stab at shimmery Hollywood Hills boudoir soul.