PSYCHEDELIC PROG
The return of Cobalt Chapel can only be a good thing. While we await a follow-up to last year’s sublime debut album (the new full-length is due in early 2019), Jarrod Gosling and Cecilia Fage offer up a tantalising EP, Mountain (Klove). There’s a greater emphasis on electronica in the scuttling title track, but it’s the combustible psych noise of the epic Canticle that really catches the breath.
Not content with issuing one of this year’s best psychedelic offerings in Freedom’s Goblin, Ty Segall has now reunited with fellow Californian Tim Presley, aka White Fence, for their second album together. Joy
(Drag City) sees the duo experiment with form, shifting moods with elastic frequency on trippy folk prog songs that dash between Syd-ish reverie (Good Boy; Do Your Hair) to waking nightmares (She Is Gold) to modernist visions of Arthur Lee’s Love (Body Behaviour). And there’s a knowing wink to the past on the spidery Hey Joel, Where You Going With That?.
Things take an altogether heavier turn on Under The Influence, the new EP from Philadelphia’s Ecstatic Vision. Making good on last year’s aptly named Raw Rock Fury, the stoner psych quartet serve up a torrent of noise lashed to hard-smacking grooves as they cover six songs from some of their major inspirations. Brace yourself for mighty reconfigurations of Hawkwind’s Master Of The Universe and Born To Go, plus a wild distortion of the MC5’s Come Together and a mind-mashing The Bad Will Die, a lesser-known gem from the vault of Zambia’s leading guitar guru of the 70s, Keith Mlevhu.
On a more cosmic tip, the second coming of
Idris Ackamoor & The Pyramids continues with the exquisite An Angel Fell (Strut). The Chicago native, born Bruce Baker, started touring his Afro-jazz sound in the 70s, before making a welcome return to the studio in 2016. The latest album is a triumphant mix of Afrobeat, psychedelia and left-field jazz, with Ackamoor’s tenor sax blowing free on Tinoge and the ravishing interstellar dub of Land Of Ra.
Thrills of a more esoteric kind are the stock-in-trade of German collective Datashock. Kräuter der Provinz (Bureau B) is motored by early-70s kosmische, but morphs constantly over seven improvised tracks of varying strangeness. Hullu Gullu, wir liefern Shizz fuses tribal elements with violins and ambient drones, though the real keeper is Im Zuchtstall der Existenzhengste. An open-ended jam that exists in the nebulous area between psych and prog, a steady hum gradually gives way to restless beats, before subsiding into the ether.
And there’s just enough space to flag up Beach Burrito (Stolen Body), the debut EP from the promising Bristol quartet Captain Süün. Their riffy, psychedelic fuzz is intoxicating in full flow, particularly on the lawless title track.
Take a trip with ROB HUGHES as he seeks out the latest mind-expanding music.