Columnfortably Numb: Psych Rock for June by JR Moores

While some would dismiss it as a novelty move, there’s nothing wrong with a strong concept as long as you’ve got the musical goods to pull it off. After all, it’s kept GWAR on a steady diet of meat sandwiches for decades now. Metamorphosis is the fifth chapter in the ongoing froglore and it explores how the human protagonist, Herman, became The Mystic Toad who is the spiritual guide of an ancient amphibious god. At times, particularly when Benjamin “Froglord” Oak is croaking his green head off, the style is so heavy it could qualify for our metal column. It is also psychedelic enough to suggest these guys have licked the backs of more Incilius alvarii than they’ve had hot dinners. They’re also a versatile bunch who cover a lot of ground. ‘Herman’ is a catchy desert-rock stomp with added harmonica. ‘The Swamp’ is a concise workout in the key of doom. ‘Cryptids’ punches especially well in the way it manages to fuse elements of stoner rock, grunge, sludge and space rock into something fresh, powerful and accessible. And it’s all carried out in frog masks. You’d have to say they’re Kermitted to the cause.

Pub quiz question. What do the following records all have in common? Cream’s Wheels Of Fire. The Allman Brothers Band’s Eat A Peach. U2’s Rattle And Hum. ZZ Top’s Fandango! Rust Never Sleeps and a bunch of other ones by Neil Young. No, they don’t all feature Rick Wakeman on guest ivories. Well, they might do. I haven’t really checked. Truth is, they’re albums featuring both live songs and studio recordings. Here’s another hybrid LP to add to the list, from the bearded psych vet Mr. Alexander and his troupe of cosmic co-improvisers. First up is a delightfully mellow studio rendition of ‘Starpower’. Guest Kate Wright from Crescent and Movietone joins Jeff for the high vocal verses while the collective meander away with twinkling abandon. The instrumental ‘Bernal Afterburn’ both funks and jazzes matters up a notch, the stoned-sounding licks of the guitarists being complemented by Scott Verrastro’s busier drum patterns. Flip the disc over and there you’ll find ‘Plastistone Circle (Slight Return)’, taped at Milwaukee Psych Festival when the band were joined by Isaiah Collier on saxophone and other bits and pieces. This is the kind of 20-minute, sun-setting, far-out, transcendence-inducing jamathon that should be the norm at the average “psych fest”, rather than having a lineup dominated by whatever indie (or major label) acts with guitars (or not) the organisers have managed to book. We’ve all seen the posters.

What a perfect title for a quality prog recording. The idiom indicates an obsession that you can’t take your mind off, no matter how hard you try. The literal imagery is a swarm of stripy insects with menacing stings flying around your noggin. Both, for some reason, sound pretty prog to me. Equally at home in jazz dens and rock clubs, Hedvig Mollestad Trio are talented virtuosos who make sure to remember the all-important power of the riff. We’re talking about the chunkier end of King Crimson, Rush and the like. Opener ‘See See Bop’ has its pauses, time changes and token guitar solo passage. At heart, though, it’s basically all riff. A mighty riff it is, too, as if ZZ Top had misplaced their gear en route to a festival and were forced to borrow that of Fu Manchu.  The fast and complicated lead lines dominate ‘Golden Griffin’. It still rocks hard, however, thanks to the rhythm section playing so heftily it seems they’re actively trying to damage their own instruments before they reach the end of the song. ‘Itta’ veers towards metal territory with its stop/start guitar and piercing solo. The trio bring things down on the jazz ballad ‘Lamament’. Then it’s amplifiers up to 11 again for the scorching finale, ‘Apocalypse Slow’.

Instrumental post rock (and/or post metal) invites interpretations to be projected onto it because there’s no lead singer venting their emotional pain and political grievances or telling audiences “This one’s about how your bag for life ain’t gonna solve the planet’s bigger problems, yeah?” Well, get this. Neither is rock & roll! Anyway, the backstory could be affecting this reading but Chicago’s Pelican sound freshly fired up on album number seven. Flickering Resonance marks the return of founding guitarist Laurent Schroeder-Lebec who left after 2009’s What We All Come To Need. It’s not strictly a return-to-roots album but with the original lineup reinstalled there is a no-nonsense emphasis on just rocking the hell out together like they did in the old days without worrying too much about fiddlier instrumental or compositional embellishments. There’s a defiant sense of positivity, too, in contrast to some of the band’s darker moments. Take the way ‘Evergreen’ bounces along on its cascading riffs, quietens down for a jiffy and then explodes back into the main action. Likewise, ‘Specific Resonance’ has an elegant middle movement, like a Spanish-trained Mogwai, yet its surrounding material is as heavy as Metallica. In a way, this is Pelican’s most straightforwardly rockin’ record since their mighty debut, Australasia. With the overall mood being relatively buoyant and the variety of textures offered on tracks such as ‘Flickering Stillness’, a step backwards it is not. 

Danish wizards Causa Sui have divided their new 50-minute album across a double 10-inch because… why the hell not? It makes sense stylistically, they say, because each side has its own distinct character. They haven’t specified further so let’s give it a shot. The three songs on Side A set the scene as the wah-wahing guitars writhe around warm organ tones and tasty drum fills. Side B has a sole piece, ‘Moledo’, which could be desert rock’s answer to jazz fusion. It might also be tipping its sombrero to Frank Zappa with some of its indulgently extravagant noodling. Next up, ‘Boogie Lord’s Revenge’ seems to be CS’ equivalent of surf music while its accompanying ditty, ‘Spree’, offers softly star-gazing space rock. Side D hosts the lengthy ‘Astral Shores’. This one starts very loosely and takes fuller form gradually and seamlessly so that almost before you realise it’s really rocketing towards the heavens with righteous intent.

I was watching the film Sisu the other day. As its silent and bearded protagonist slayed a bunch of Nazi gits in a succession of cartoonishly gory ways, I thought to myself “Now there’s a bloke who doesn’t mess around.” The same could be said of that character’s fellow Finlanders, Skyjoggers. There are four songs on 12021: Post-Electric Apocalypse, which rattle through plenty of different sections, and they all rock harder than a piston splitter. The material, we are told, has been informed by death, loss and despair in the face of Amazon forest fires and various wars. That might cause some bands to wallow in doom metal misery. Not this lot, for the most part. They just let rip, then let rip, then let rip again. Sure, ‘Newtonin Kanuuna’ is slower, shorter and more groove-oriented than the hyperactive 14-minute opener, ‘Huevos Rancheros / Rapid Round’. They both rip though, just in slightly different forms. ‘Døpehølm’ is the darkest slab, thanks in part to its echoing screams. Even here, the spacey effects take the edge off. When ‘Tessæil’ hits, they’re firing on all cylinders again like a hoard possessed. 

Junk Drawer’s material is deceptively clever, perhaps intuitively so. The Belfast group’s second album has a crisply recorded sound, at least at first, something which doesn’t detract from the early songs’ balmy dizziness. At their most alt-country they recall the later work of Meat Puppets. Other touchstones to their melodic quirkiness could include everything from the art pop of Super Furry Animals, through post punk unwritten manifesto adherents Wire, to the precision slacker rock of Parquet Courts. On first listen to ‘Brown Sunshine’, for instance, listeners might expect this spiralling tune to build from its clean and spindly guitar tones to full-bore distorted crescendo. Just as that’s about to happen, the group start whistling together instead. They can whip out a hazy ballad, too, as demonstrated on the twinkling ‘Where Goes The Time’. Even on that one, something unusual occurs about halfway through. Adding to the surprises, the LP’s style grows temporarily dingier with the introduction of the bibulous ‘Loughgall Circus’. It suggests Fat White Family have just moved in down the road, their presence corrupting everything it touches like some oozing black tar in an episode of Stranger Things. The playful sonic brightness returns on ‘Ghosts Of Leisure’ to suggest the light might be winning. 

Children In The Darkness was recorded live, at midnight, by the five members of Taiwan’s Dope Purple with guest saxophonist Yong Yandsen and extra drummer Darren Moore. There are three “songs”, in one of the loosest senses of the term. Maybe three “rituals” would be more fitting. On Side A is the longest ceremony. ‘New Psyche & Beyond The Body’ opens with Yandsen blowing away between pauses while the musicians slowly scratch, tap and strum their way into the throng. About seven minutes in, as it begins to take some sort of shape, it’s like Ornette Coleman playing with The Heads. Then the tempo increases and they’re really hurtling through an asteroid storm as stray rocks, debris and Katy Perry’s discarded dignity bash into the sides of the rocket capsule. ‘Night Flying’ has a groovier opening and it builds around the bass repetitions steadily until, after about ten minutes, this one also kicks off with the double-speed of Motörhead and the scorching effects of Acid Mothers Temple. The serener title track has a melancholic chord progression, similar to that used by a goosebumping post rock band like Mono. The echoing vocal moans make this a weirder experience, however, as does the Eddie Hazel or Hendrixian lead in the background.

When they first tried to make this album in 2017, Baltimore’s Birth (Defects) fell apart and they ended up shelving it. Circumstances have led to its completion, although even that had its hurdles as the man who was meant to be mixing it, Steve Albini, passed away. Matthew Barnhart finished the job at Electrical Audio instead. Now it has finally seen the light of day Deceiver / Mirror is still intended to be the band’s grand final statement. “I want it to be the last thing I do with music,” singer Sean Gray has told the Washington Post. Bit of a shame, that, as the record is full of what we might call spunk. But why not go out on a high? The band make a filthy noise-rock racket in the tradition of Cherubs and various other unhinged AmRep alumni. Extra textures are provided by the often high-pitched electronic elements squealing away behind the traditional guitars-drums setup. Gray’s disgruntled yelling recalls that of Kurt Cobain in his roughest and least self-conscious moments, like on those secret Nirvana album tracks where he goes “grumble… grumble… grumble… WWRRRAAAAAAARRRRRRRGGGGGGHHHH!” Despite the rawness, there are tunes on here in the same sense that TAD or The Jesus Lizard could sort-of write such things. Take ‘Despotism’, for example, or ‘Under’. Sing along with less care for your vocal cords than the cast of Jackass, in their prime, had for the state of their skin ‘n’ bones.