Psych albums
Say Psych: Album Review: The Gluts – Bang!
Italians The Gluts last month released their latest LP, Bang!, and its taken me that long to find the words to do credit to such an amazing offering, which even by their high standards, is impeccable. Released on Fuzz Club Records, it follows 2021’s Ungrateful Heart LP, a punk masterpiece that left them with big …
Say Psych: Album Review: The Third Sound – Most Perfect Solitude
Berlin psych/post-punk band The Third Sound have recently released their sixth studio album Most Perfect Solitude. It is the follow up to 2022’s First Light and has been eagerly anticipated for some time. The LP marks a new chapter, not just in sound but personnel, for the band led by Icelandic musician and author Hakon …
Album Review: The Lemon Twigs – A Dream Is All We Know: The Lemon Twigs Shine Bright with Retro Pop Brilliance
I mean, it’s obvious when you think about it. Pull together the best bits from mid-term Beatles, the sunshine pop of The Beach Boys, baroque elements beloved of The Left Banke, Love, the psych pop of bands such as West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, and elements of Todd Rundgren, Nick Lowe, and the likes, …
Album Review: Flamingods – Head of Pomegranate; London based psych indie quartet return with a delicious slice of fuzzy, summery fun
Bahrain born but London based psych infused quartet Flamingods return with their sixth album, ‘Head of Pomegranate’ out now on the Liquid Lable. It takes the listener on a euphonic world tour, starting in Los Angeles with the psychedelic dream pop delight ‘Dreams (On The Strip)’, we then head to the coast for current single Adana. …
Album review: The Holy Family – ‘The Holy Family’: an exultant, double-album trip into innerspace
MASTERFUL psychedelic imprint Rocket Recordings has added another string to its bow with the signing of the hallucinatory collective The Holy Family, whose first album arrives this Friday. And a hell of a trip it is, too, roaming freely across modern electronica and the oldest, earthiest folk, the most dronesome of motorik and the molten …
Album Review: Land Trance – ‘First Séance’: dazzlingly cinematic and truly exploratory
A cinematic vista of an album, stitched seamlessly through each siphoning of emphatic, elevating, melancholic elation.
Album review: ROY -‘Roy’s Garage’: a magic carpet ride around the psychedelic pop globe
ROY does nothing exactly new with Roy’s Garage, but he does everything with a deft touch and real understanding. If you love British and American psych circa 1966 to 1968, has many an album on Bam Caruso, Edsel, Sundazed, then you should embrace this record wholeheartedly; if your experience of this particular era of psych – before what scientists call the Iron Butterfly event horizon, when pop melody and brain-feeding sonic exploration sit in balance on the scales and before the freakout totally becomes the event – then this album is a great gateway drug. ROY knows. You’d be wise to let him guide you through. It’s time to make a little more room in your psychedelic pop-lovin’ heart for him.
Album review: TEKE::TEKE – ‘Shirushi’: a deliciously wonky, delectably trippy psych debut
RULE one: Japanese bands do brilliant, brilliant things with guitars: this is just fact. From the mind-blowing chaos of Melt-Banana to the heavy psych stylings of Acid Mothers Temple and Bo Ningen, down through the garage-rawk of Guitar Wolf and the dreamy, trippy-hippy psych of Ghost, new and deeper appreciations of how to wield and …
Album review: E.R. Jurken – ‘I Stand Corrected’: a psych-folk debut full of catharsis and melody
E.R. Jurken’s first full missive into the world reveals quite the saddest tale at an angle, never telling, always hinting. It also shows an absolute grasp of songcraft, of melody, and an abiding love of British psych-pop and later American geniuses such as Neutral Milk Hotel and Elliott Smith