Words by Jonathan Stout
When not doing freelance writing, Jonathan Stout is heavily involved in the NKY and Cincinnati music scenes as the Marketing Manager for Kentucky based venue The Southgate House Revival and founder of DIY Recording label Lo Fi City Recordings. He’s also an active musician, performing and recording with Sleepy Drums, Mutt Fuzz, Burnt Cabins and Uncle Fungus.
2024 began with a slow sputter of music releases. However, it’s pretty clear that the faucet is on full blast nowadays, and I’ve been scrambling to try and catch up! From this outpouring of new music has come a great deal of quality releases from the wide ranging psychedelic umbrella.
It dawned on me recently (embarrassing to admit, I know) that shoegaze is actually one of the most psychedelic genres in today’s alternative rock palette. As alternative music has become fairly amorphous nowadays, with subgenres being nearly meaningless, it’s interesting to recall eras where genre definitions were so rigidly adhered to- mainly for marketing purposes and organization at record stores. But I see now that the Paisley Underground bands of the 80’s harkened back to psychedelic bands of the past, while shoegaze bands were making psychedelic rock for the future.
With this being said, it makes sense that many bands originally labeled shoegaze have since been quite successful pivoting to more psych leading sounds. No greater example exists than Ride, who released Interplay (Wichita) in March, one of their most accessible and psych pop leaning albums of their career. Gone are most of the mournful tones of their early albums in favor of some generally positive vibes and trippy songs like “Last Night I Went Somewhere To Dream” that seem taylormade for summer festival stages. The best part of this album is the band seems to be very comfortable and confident throughout the collection of songs, and the feeling of positive chemistry is contagious. Though some song titles, such as “Stay Free,” “Peace Sign” and “Portland Rocks” all seem pretty cheesy, it becomes irrelevant once you hear how heartfelt these songs are.
Long running Sydney based band, The Church, cut their teeth appealing to goth and new wave audiences, but they’ve since had keen focus on filtering their spacey melancholy through a psychedelic lens, which has served them well creatively. From the title to the artwork, their latest release, Eros Zeta and the Perfumed Guitars (Easy Action) is a psychedelic trip through and through. The companion album to 2023’s The Hypnogogue, Zeta expands on that album’s science fiction concept with vivid lyrical imagery and a hazy atmosphere throughout. In fact, atmosphere is possibly this band’s most cherished weapon, as their album maintains sonic identity though many different composition styles are executed. “The Weather” rocks hard with ominous swagger, while “A Strange Past” bounces, guided by an earworm of a lead guitar melody and vivid lyrics describing mysterious scenery. They’re even still able to tap into the goth moodiness of their 80’s albums with songs like “Sublimated in Song,” which could have been slipped onto The Cure’s Disintegration when no one was looking.
We’ll close this out now by heading into some heavier territory. First, with Face the Psych, the new album by Portugal’s Misleading. This is one of my favorite releases of the year thus far simply because of how adventurous and thrilling it is. As the title suggests, this collection is like a survey of the best of psych subgenres. From the heavy doom of “Tutte le Nova Vite”, to the organ dominant proto-metal of “Lenny’s Gone”, to the krautrock of “Spazio Nacosto”, this record has something for everyone. Some of these tracks are possibly improvised, which helps give the songs an extra sense of excitement and urgency. And just like the masters of the past, Electric Wizard and Dead Meadow, this band has the ability to jam on a single heavy riff potentially forever if they were left to their own devices. That’s not to say that these compositions are boring- on the contrary, the results are quite mesmerizing.
We’ll end this edition of Head Space with another recent favorite of mine, Portal Within (Kozmik Artifactz) by another Sydney based band, Robot God. This album really takes everything that the band was already great at and brings it up to the next level. Blending together everything from stoner metal to psych, space, prog and even spaghetti western confidently and uniquely, this album pulls the listener in and takes them on a sonic adventure. The spacey opener, “Long Way Round,” slowly burns, building intensity, ending triumphantly to introduce the lumbering doom riff machine of “Illusion of Order.” Even the longer compositions of Portal Within remain interesting as they always shapeshift and barrel forwards with heft and urgency. To put it simply- this album just hits right- from literal execution to overall vibe. Robot God really gets it right on Portal Within.
That’s it for the May edition of Head Space, but make sure to tune in next month as we’ll take a deeper dive into the heady releases of 2024, possibly venturing into even more obscure territory!