Trippy Tropical Sounds From Rising Stars of the Once and Hopefully Future Barbes Scene

When Chicha Libre, the band responsible for introducing so much of the world to psychedelic cumbia, went on ice, their legendary Monday night Barbes residency was turned over to a new generation of slinky, trippy tropical acts. Locobeach were the first of that wave of acts to put out an album; now it’s Los Cumpleaños’ turn. Their debut release, Agua – streaming at Bandcamp – officially comes out today: a year from now, we can say “¡Feliz!”

Let’s just hope the band – singer/percussionist Nestor Gomez, keyboardist Eric Lane, trombonist Alex Asher and drummer Lautaro Burgos – are still around so that can happen. Barbes is cold and dark right now, and who knows how much longer musicians in this city can hold out without running out of basic necessities. Of course, there are always underground shows…but that’s something we can’t discuss here.

For now, we have the album. The first track, Camarones has shapeshiftingly loopy beats, blips and swirls from the synth and echoey trombone that echoes another Brooklyn band, deep dub reggae crew Super Hi-Fi.

There’s also classic 70s dub inside the the techy swirl and warp of the epic, practically ten-minute title cut. “Ole drinking water, keep on running,” is the message. To bad they had to autotune the vocals: a version without them would be infinitely more fun.

With its Balkan bagpipe loops, cascades, swells and fuzzily pouncing video game textures, Sonrisa will defininitely make you smile. A long, drifting outer-space baroque theme introduces the last song, Baile la Cumbia. Finally, the band stop teasing you and bring in a groove out of all that sticky green dub.

A Mighty, Epic, Surreal Double Live Album From King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard

Australian rock can be very surreal, and there’s none more surreal than psychedelic road warriors King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard‘s vast catalog. They put out albums at a frenetic pace, have a passion for edgy Middle Eastern tonalities and don’t show any sign of slowing down. Their latest release, Chunky Shrapnel – streaming at Bandcamp – is a lavish double live lp recorded at several European festivals last year. It’s the band at their most squalling, three-guitar intense: the swoosh and swirl of many of their studio records gets switched out for a roaring attack and a deliciously Balkan-tinged triptych at the end.

After a murky, ambient soundscape, the band launch into the sarcastic faux-lounge of The Rover. About three minutes in, they take a pause and then shift into high gear for some Os Mutantes tropicalia, a haphazard guitar solo from frontman Stu Mackenzie kicking off a long quasi-funk jam.

The group take their time straightening out the rhythm as they segue into the wryly titled Wah Wah, Ambrose Kenny-Smith’s organ lingering behind the guitars of Joey Walker and Cook Craig, As drummers Michael Cavanagh and Eric Moore pound away, they shift right into the jubilantly galloping, metal-tinged Road Train.

Lucas Harwood’s tricky, loopy bass riffage propels the distantly Middle Eastern-flavored Murder of the Universe, ablaze in oscillating guitar distortion. They hit a hardcore drive with the furious eco-disaster parable Planet B, winding down to a boomy bass loop. A London crowd goes nuts for a silly drum solo; then the Lizards (Wizards?) pick up right where they left off with a pummeling, acidic take of Venusian 2, from a Milan gig.

Hell is pretty much straight-up thrashmetal, with more of a delicious Middle Eastern chromatic tinge: it’s one of the record’s high points. The White Denim-style pseudo-soul of Let Me Mend the Past makes a jarring segue, even with its tastily shrieky guitar break.

The Turkish-flavored Inner Cells, with its tricky tempos, suspenseful keys and icepick bass, is another killer cut. The synth cleverly picks up that same Balkan riff and runs with it in Loyalty, switching out eventually for brooding mellotron. They continue the magnificently dark, dancing interlude with Horology and cap off the record with practically twenty-minute take of A Brief History of Planet Earth, part Grateful Dead, part Doors LA Woman with a little Balkan punk and Jethro Tull mixed in. This is one of the best albums these guys have ever made – and they’ve made a bunch.

The Dream Syndicate’s Most Epic, Psychedelic Masterpiece: A New Double Vinyl Record

The Dream Syndicate distinguish themselves from the legions of jambands out there with the sheer intensity and focus of the guitar duels between bandleader Steve Wynn and lead player Jason Victor – and their songs’ carefully crafted narratives. One of the band’s signature moves is to take Wynn’s tightly wound three-and-a-half-minute riff-rock gems and thrash the hell out of them.

Their new double viinyl album, The Universe Inside – streaming at Bandcamp – takes a turn in a radically different direction. It’s a suite, by far the band’s most psychedelic record: history may judge this as the fullest realization of the vision Wynn introduced on the band’s influential debut, The Days of Wine and Roses. There are element of jazz, art-rock and latin music here, but ultimately this is its own animal.

Bassist Mark Walton more or less loops a catchy, dry, trebly riff as Wynn and Victor triangulate in a spare exchange with guest Stephen McCarthy’s lingering guitar-sitar to open the album’s twenty-minute first track, The Regulator. Shards of reverb and sputters of sparks from the amps punctuate those succinct phrases amid the swirl and pulse: Chris Cacavas’ echoey electric piano becomes the icing on this space cake. With drummer Dennis Duck and percussionist Johnny Hott’s supple shuffle groove, Carlos Santana’s late 60s jams come to mind, but also Isaac Hayes’ sprawling psychedelic soul vamps – and Meddle-era Pink Floyd, and Angelo Badalamenti’s David Lynch film themes.

There’s a spoken-word vocal that concerns soothing the soul and blown fuses, both things this band know something about. Marcus Tenney’s one-man horn section wafts through the mix – some sax, some trumpet, sometimes both, frequently evoking Sonny Rollins’ work on the Stones’ Waiting on a Friend. It ends as you would expect it

The groove expands, the spacerock becoming more drifty in the second track, The Longing. This tragedy occurred “Like it happened moments ago, distant across the chasm…the harder you try to fix it, eliminate, deep-six it, all that remains is the longing,” Wynn sings, pushing against the top of his register.

The three six-string guys – that’s McCarthy on six-string bass here – trade off warmly major-key Ticket to Ride phrases as Apropos Of Nothing gets underway. It’s a classic, cynical, allusively grim Wynn narrative

What were you expecting
What did you become
Apropos of nothing
Chain reaction before the fall

And just when the band have lulled you into an alterred state, they hit a crunchy, roaring What Goes On drive.

The sardonic jousting that introduces the instrumental Dusting Off the Rust – a line from The Regulator – is one of the album’s funniest moments. This one’s a gritty slinker, a trippy dichotomy of punchy riffs and swirling cascades in the same vein as the spidery Topanga Canyon Freaks, from Wynn’s iconic 2001 Here Come the Miracles album.

The record’s final cut, The Slowest Rendition rises from a web of aching bent-note cries, to a pummeling drive and then a brooding, summery haze. Elegantly animated interplay aside, it’s one of Wynn’s most haunting, death-fixated songs. “Chaos flickers in the night” on “this silent, darkening, empty beach,” his disembodied narrator bracing for what comes next as the sax winds down. It’s an apt ending from the guy who wrote John Coltrane Stereo Blues. If there’s still a reason, or a means, for music blogs to exist at the end of 2020 – let’s hope there are – you will see this high on the annual best album of the year list here

A Menacing Heavy Psychedelic Gem From High Priestess

Los Angeles heavy psychedelic power trio High Priestess‘ latest release, Casting the Circle – streaming at Bandcamp – is one of the most understatedly haunting, trippy albums of the year so far. Throughout their slowly unwinding dirges, they use more imaginative sonics than your average doom metal band, from the varied guitar textures to their signature, otherworldly vocal harmonies.

They open it with the gorgeously Middle Eastern-tinged title track. Drummer Megan Mullins holds down a muted, steady suspense beneath guitarist Katie Gilchrest’s clanging, ringing acoustic/electric multitracks. Then Gilchrest hits her distortion pedal, joining voices with bassist/frontwoman Mariana Fiel, hitting a deliciously creepy wah guitar interlude.

The trio nick a riff from the macabre classical canon to open the dirgey, practically ten-minute second track, Erebus. Gilchrest’s many layers here, from crunch to clang to troubled, cautious blues and some noisy string-torturing, are just as lurid as the vocals: something about “blood on the sheets.”

Stately piano lingers behind the web of guitars in The Hourglass: imagine 70s psychedelic rockers Nektar at their slowest, with a pair of women out front. Invocation, one of this year’s longest and mesmerzing epics, is over seventeen minutes of rattling, Indian-tinged chromatics, washes of Black Angels distortion, gritty wah and an unexpected, Patti Smith style spoken-word interlude: New York’s great Desert Flower come to mind. As she does throughout the record, Mullins distinguishes herself as one of the most interesting, coloristic drummers in heavy music.

They close with the enigmatic chorale Ave Satanas, a typical move for this darkly individualistic group. You’ll see this on the best albums of 2020 page at the end of the year if there’s still reason for a music blog to exist at that point.

The New Women of Doom Compilation Salutes Females Playing Dark, Heavy Music

One of the most promising developments in heavy music over the last few years is the increasing prominence of women, and not just as lead vocalists. The new compilation lp Women of Doom – streaming at Desert Records’ Bandcamp page – celebrates that diversity with a lineup that transcends any kind of typecasting. While there’s first-class doom metal here, there’s also art-rock, postrock and cinematic tableaux.

Bassist High Priestess Nighthawk and her band Heavy Temple open the record with Astral Hand, which ends with a melodic series of screams. Getting there is just as much creepy fun, through tricky tempo shifts, hypnotic downtuned lows, Maiden-ish twin guitar riffage and allusions to Middle Eastern modes.

Year of the Cobra bassist Amy Tung Barrysmith takes a turn on keyboards in Broken, a horror-film theme with words. Swedish band Besvarjelsen skulk and gallop slowly through the stormy minor key intensity of A Curse to be Broken, frontwoman Lea Amling Alazam’s vocals half-buried in the mix.

Royal Thunder bassist Mlny Parsonz lends her luridly soulful voice to two tracks here. A Skeleton Is Born is a surreal, psychedelic mashup of oldtimey steel guitar blues, drifting spacerock and stadium bombast. She cuts loose even more on the album’s closing, minimalistic piano ballad Broke an Arrow.

Gwyn Strang’s ethereal vocals contrast with Sean Bilovecky’s hypnotic crunch in Marrow, by her band Frayle. New SubRosa spinoff the Otolith contribute Bone Dust, a wash of ominous violin and guitars hovering above a swaying Frankenstein pulse. Another SubRosa alum, guitarist Rebecca Vernon takes a turn on piano for A Shadow Covers Your Face, a moody, circling solo instrumental from her new project, the Keening.

Doomstress‘ Alexis Hollada contributes Facade, a similarly minimalist number that doesn’t bear much resemblance to her regular band’s relentless, chromatic assault. And Irish vocal powerhouse Lauren Gaynor belts out over an ornate, classically-tinged firestorm in Deathbell‘s Coldclaw.

Randy Holden’s Rare 1970 Heavy Psychedelic Album Rescued From Obscurity

In 1970, fresh off about a year playing with proto-metallers Blue Cheer, guitarist Randy Holden rented a theatre, stood in front of a wall of Sunn amps and recorded an album, Population II, whose few remaining original copies command absurd prices on the collector market. It’s just Holden and Chris Lockheed, a dynamic psychedelic rock drummer who turned out to be the perfect choice for this duo project (hence the album name). Holden would overdub similarly purposeful, imaginative bass and guitar afterward.

It’s a characteristically individualistic moment in the history of stoner music: sometimes drugs inspire people to great heights, ha. For all his love of sheer volume, Holden is not a showoff: texture, tone and tunes are his thing. Some of this you could call minimalist Hendrix. There’s some proto-doom that raises the question of whether Black Sabbath’s debut album had hit the stores by the time Holden made this, or if he was simultaneously inventing the style. Whatever the case, Riding Easy Records has done us all a favor and reissued the record – on vinyl, of course, and streaming at their album site.

The opening track, simply titled Guitar Song, is what might have doomed it to obscurity: lyrics are not Holden’s thing, although his Hendrix-at-quarterspeed heavy blues style is inspired, in a WTF, acid-baked, how-did-this-riff-just-fall-into-my-hand kind of way. On one hand, the second track, Fruit Icebergs is total Sabbath – on the other, Holden’s fat, thick, yet spare bent-note chromatics are completely different from Tony Iommi’s blistering volleys of multitracks.

Between Time is another track that would be better off as an instrumental, Holden picking an odd moment to go back to the doom of Fruit Icebergs to wind it up with a shriek. Then again, odd moments are what we love about this kind of music.

Blue My Mind, a return to leaden Hendrix, finally gets the kind of multitracks everybody’s been waiting for, Holden’s raging blues panned hard in each channel. The final song is Keeper of My Flame. The lyrics are pure Spinal Tap, but the duo build a tightly burning attack, with flaring leads that echo Hendrix and foreshadow Ron Asheton, over some bizarrely amusing, faux-Indian drumming. It’s medical marijuana in a cardboard gatefold sleeve.

A New Psychedelic Cult Classic by the Greek Theatre

If Swedish band the Greek Theatre’s 2017 album Broken Circle – streaming at Bandcamp – had come out in 1975, it would be considered a cult classic. It’s 70s psychedelia at its most colorful and outside-the-box. There are moments that look back to Pink Floyd, Nektar, the Strawbs, even the Grateful Dead, but there’s no other band on earth who sound like this. Layers and layers of guitars and less expected instruments artfully arranged throughout the sonic picture, tersely atmospheric keys, and a spring-loaded rhythm section deliver smartly orchestrated, stylistically puddlejumping, relentlessly uneasy trippiness. Who said they don’t make music like this anymore?

Take the first track, Fat Apple. The opening quickly winds down to a delicate, starry theme with what seems to be a bagpipe wafting through the glimmer – Pink Floyd with Celtic tinges. “Castrate all your fears,” frontman Sven Froberg advises as a cautionary tale of a Dylanesque ballad, sparkling with pedal steel, suddenly appears. “See what you became, what a shame you turned out this way.” They take this seven-minute epic out with a swaying twin-guitar duel. Are we having fun yet?

Spiky, gleaming guitars and airy keys introduce Paper Moon, rising to a restrained gallop, a brooding tale of hiding out from trouble capped off with an elegant mandolin solo. Still Lost Out at Sea follows a drifting 6/8 pulse, lilting soprano sax carrying a wistful sea chantey tune over a low-key acoustic web. “Go back through the years, see how it feels, find out what’s real,” Froberg gently suggests.

“They’re selling drugs down at the mall, and though we know, we don’t tell a single soul,” he quietly announces over a similar, mutedly triumphant folk-rock backdrop in Stray Dog Blues, which wouldn’t be out of place in the Marty Willson-Piper catalog. They follow with the pensive instrumental 1920, its deft echo phrasing and balance of subtly dynamic acoustic guitars and distantly omious kickdrum.

The album’s unexpectedly optimistic, increasingly anthemic title track fades up into a rumbling sway, its icy, echoey, resonant guitar multitracks recalling Pink Floyd’s Animals as well as Nektar’s Journey to the Center of the Eye. From there the band go back to instrumental territory with the delicate, bluegrass-tinged Ruby-khon.

Likewise, Kings of Old has a rustic Strawbs-like intro, then the band leaps into an early Genesis-style vamp with more of that delicious, watery chorus-box guitar they like so much. The deftly fingerpicked final cut, Now Is the Time makes a benedictory, warmly hypnotic coda, complete with a calmly shamanic outro.

Unpredictable, Deliciously Psychedelic Venezuelan Sounds From Insolito UniVerso

Digging through the crates to find another treat for you today! Paris-based Venezuelan expats Insólito UniVerso’s deliciously unpredictable, psychedelic album La Candela Del Río – streaming at Bandcamp – landed on the hard drive here in 2018. With their adopted city under an even more severe lockdown than New York, we can only hope the band are surviving.

Looking back, maybe the reason why the album sat around as long as it did without getting any attention here is that the opening track, Transmutada takes so long to get going. When it does, it’s a perfectly pleasant bossa-tinged waltz with surreal touches like keyboardist Edgar Bonilla Jiménez’s electric harpsichord and what sounds like a mellotron, plus, Raúl Monsalve’s dancing bass solo midway through.

The band really put the rubber to the road with the wryly circling Vuelve, with its joropo llanero triplet rhythm, rapidfire lyrics about doing things over and over again, and keening psychedelic organ. It’s like Brooklyn’s Las Rubias Del Norte at their trippiest.

Frontwoman Maria Fernanda Ruette’s multitracked cuatro mingles with the organ in the slowly swaying, bittersweetly gorgeous Machurucuto, a shout-out to a Venezuelan seaside town. The smoky, dubby breakdown comes as a surprise: imagine Country Joe & the Fish with a woman out front. After that, the group pick up the pace with the jauntily rippling Pájaro, which could be a rhythmically trickier Os Mutantes.

Lloviendo en Guatire, which opens on side 2 of the record, blends a hypnotic, Indian-influenced theme with dreampop, surf guitar and bass over drummer Andres Sequera’s mutedly suspenseful beats. He gets a lot busier behind the eerily acidic keys and fuzztone bass in Yo Soy Mi Río. Scampering along with the minor-key rivulets from the band’s arsenal of keyboards, their instrumental cover of harpist José Gregorio López’s El Vuelo del Gabán is the album’s catchiest track and closest thing to psychedelic cumbia here. They close it with Tonada del Guante, a slowly swaying, dubwise, bass-fueled update on an old Venezuelan work song. It’s like nothing you’ve heard this year. If psychedelic sounds are your thing, you’re in for a treat.

Iconic Heavy Psychedelic Band Revisit Deep Cuts With Surprising Results

Can you imagine if Blue Oyster Cult’s Don’t Fear the Reaper made its debut on corporate radio in 2020? The politically correct crowd would crash Instagram with all their outraged selfie vids. “I can’t believe you’d be so irresponsible as to play a song that ADVOCATES TEEN SUICIDE!!!!!”

The band, of course, leave it open to multiple interpretations: it could just as easily be about drugs..or a love song, heh heh heh. And it’s a far cry from their best work: for that, you need to dig into their first four records. Over that initial span of releases, there is no other act in the history of rock music who were better.

Not the Stones, who weren’t ready for prime time. Not the Beatles, although they get an asterisk because their manager and record label held them back. Not the Dream Syndicate (who got screwed even worse by their label), the Velvets (who couldn’t pull their shit together, basically), the Stooges (who learned on the fly), Pink Floyd (who had to regroup after their bandleader self-destructed), the Dead Kennedys (whose second album was awful), David Bowie (who got off to a bad start) or Richard Thompson (ever try listening to Henry the Human Fly?). And as revolutionary and brilliant as the first four albums by Elvis Costello, the Jam, the Clash, X, Parliament/Funkadelic and several others are, Blue Oyster Cult’s classic early stuff is just as strong, and smart, and sometimes a lot funnier.

So why would this blog cover something as crazy as the band’s new recording, a 40th anniversary celebration of their uneven 1976 Agents of Fortune album, recorded live in concert in 2016 and streaming at Spotify? Because it’s just plain preposterous. Right off the bat, this isn’t even the same band that made the original: the Bouchard brothers’ rhythm section disintegrated back in the 80s, and we lost the great Allen Lanier a couple of decades later. Still, this is actually an improvement on the original!

Frontman/guitarist Eric Bloom, once a fine, clear-voice singer, doesn’t do much more than rasp these days. But lead guitarist Buck Dharma still has his chops here, and the replacements are clearly psyched to play a lot of material that these days falls into the deep-cuts category. There’s snap to the bass, a leadfoot groove but a groove nonetheless from the drums, and a lot of swirly organ.

They open with This Ain’t the Summer of Love, a riffy anti-hippie anthem that isn’t much more than rehashed Stones….but they seem to be having fun with it. They can’t do much with True Confessions, an ill-advised attempt at mashing up that sound with doo-woppy soul. Although Bloom can’t hit the high notes in the ominously circling hit single, and the band must be sick to death of it, they manage not to phone it in. “Forty thousand men and women coming every day!” State of the world, 2020, huh?

This edition of the band’s take of the “classic rock” radio staple E.T.I. (Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) isn’t as quite as offhandedly macabre as the original, but it still has a gleefully sinister ring. The Revenge of Vera Gemini – which original keyboardist Lanier co-wrote with his girlfriend at the time, Patti Smith – is heavier and a lot more menacing.

Dharma’s icy chromatics can’t quite elevate Sinful Love above the level of generically strutting powerpop. Likewise, Tattoo Vampire is a second-rate Led Zep ripoff. Morning Final, a haphazard attempt to blend Lou Reed urban noir and latin soul as the Stones did it on Sticky Fingers, is so bizarre it’s pretty cool.

From there the band segue into Tenderloin: disco-pop was not their forte. They wind up the record, and the show, with Debbie Denise: what an understatedly bittersweet, profoundly Lynchian pop song! A sparse audience cheer enthusiastically afterward.

Psychedelic Rock Icon With Inspired Band Picks Up Gloriously Where He Left Off

What can a person do at night in a place that suddenly became the City That Always Sleeps?

You could pick up your instrument, or sit down at it, and write something.

If you gravitate toward big, ornate sounds, you could tune in to the New York Philharmonic’s live webcast.

Or you could watch James Tonkin‘s new concert film Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets: Live at the Roadhouse. It hasn’t hit VOD yet, but the audio is streaming at Spotify. This isn’t just your ordinary Pink Floyd cover band: “There’s so many thousands, all playing the same four albums,” guitarist Gary Kemp smirks. “The first thing that will be really telling will be to see how they change their setlists as a result of us doing this!”

What differentiates these guys from the wannabes is that they play exclusively pre-Dark Side material from the Syd Barrett and early David Gilmour eras. They also managed to convince Floyd’s iconic drummer to join them. After a few well-received shows, they had this frequently glorious concert immortalized, at a venue where the Barrett edition of the band were the first group to play.

To open the show, Telecaster player Kemp picks hard on his low E string, second Tele player Lee Harris launches into the evil, chromatic descending riff of the instrumental Interstellar Overdrive, then bassist Guy Pratt – playing a snappy Rickenbacker – joins the song along with organist Dom Beken and the bandleader…and they’re off. In general, throughout the concert, the music has a tighter, somewhat lighter-fingered pulse than the reckless abandon of the Syd Barrett era. The songs also tend to be more ornate, but in a lot of ways the additional layers raise the psychedelic factor. Who wants to hear a band play something exactly as it was recorded, anyway?

Jim Parsons’ classic rock-doc production is purist: lots of fretboard close-ups, panning the stage and then back. The sound mix is tastefully oldschool as well. To his infinite credit, the bandleader is toward the back, just as he was throughout Pink Floyd’s tenure: he’s always been a guy to let the sound out of his kit instead of trying to bang something into it. And what a big kit it is. One of his bandmates remarks that even in his seventies, Mason’s vigor is “terrifying.” Maybe his subtlety has something to do with that.

Tellingly, it takes two guitarists to replicate what both Barrett and Gilmour did, with plenty of noise and echo, closer to the former’s style than the latter’s anguished, Hendrix-inspired existential screams. Likewise, Beken has a Rick Wright-sized array of textures at his disposal, orchestrating the music with more of an overtly trippy ripple and twinkle than just the vast deep-space textures the late, great Pink Floyd keyboardist constructed so expertly.

The group segue into Astronomy Domine after the night’s opening jagged surrealism: this song is a little more bluesy than the original, but practically just as crazed in places, the bass obviously higher than that instrument typically was recorded in 1967 when Roger Waters played it. Lucifer Sam and Arnold Layne seem a little fast. and rotely digital; yet that same approach improves Fearless, underscoring that otherwise gentle pastoral pop tune’s druggy narrative.

The woozy instrumentals Obscured by Clouds and When You’re In seem odd choices, little more than a platform for Kemp’s simple slide work. As does Vegetable Man, considering what happened to Barrett. In that context, the “why can’t we reach the sun” refrain in Remember a Day has special poignancy, a cautionary tale to the extreme.

While Kemp stays on key more than Waters did singing If, the gloomily sunbaked madness anthem, Waters’ acid-damaged vocals are stil missed. As are the horns and orchestra of Atom Heart Mother – at least we get about seven minutes of the majestic main theme, emphasis on the macabre.

The proto-metal of The Nile Song holds up well (and foreshadows a famous Johnny Rotten lyric). The alien-encounter anthem Let There Be More Light has an almost gleefully grim intensity; likewise, the bulked-up version of the rarely played Gilmour narrative Childhood’s End is more richly dark.

The show’s centerpiece, the menacingly raga-influenced Set the Controls For the Heart of the Sun, has a literally breathtaking vastness, Mason having a wryly good time with his huge gongs and then his mallets on the toms. The band pick up the pace with the hauntingly bittersweet See Emily Play, romp through Barrett’s mid 60s Carnaby Street pop tune Bike, then hammer their way through One of These Days, Waters’ strobe-lit repeaterbox instrumental from the Meddle album.

Fueled by Beken’s funereal chromatics and enveloping, smoky echoes, the band go way down the rabbit hole with A Saucerful of Secrets and end the show triumphantly with Point Me At the Sky. The film also contains a few snippets of live footage from the Barrett years plus a bit of context from individual band members. Who would have thought that in 2020, anyone would attempt, let alone succeed in revisiting these classic sounds?