http://www.myspace.com/yourpsychtunes

1 Because it’s FREE

2 Just to confirm to yourself that Psychedelia didn’t die after all. It just went out into the desert and slipped through the cracks in the earth – and has been making an interstellar spaced out racket underground ever since.

3 Those kids at YOUR PSYCH TUNES sure know how to put a compilation together. They’ve been doing it for over 2 years and every one of the compilations to date have been a carefully hand-stitched fusion of familiar sounds and brand new bands guaranteed to get inside your head. Chances are if you’ve only been paying attention to mainstream music for the last couple of years that you won’t have heard of any of these bands before. Which makes it all the better doesn’t it? You can be the weird kid in the school playground and turn your nose up at the popularity of The Black Keys, or you can simply keep it all locked away in the swirling, burling confines of your own head.

4 So as you can remember just how fucking great THE SHIVAS are – I mean, those kids are on fire with “Look So Good, Be So Good”

5 It’s the ideal soundtrack for any strange old day.

6 Because it’s always a good time for a change, to dig new music and follow the songstreams wherever they run. I for one will be checking out the likes of JEFF SYLVA (beautiful acoustic Arthur-Lee-esque “Syllables”), STATIC CLING (holy shit what a voice), MEMPHIS GRAHAM (sitar-led pysychedelic perfection of “Colour”), and KIM AND THE CINDERS (“Loved To Death” is bluesy supersensory brilliance). But don’t take my word for it, there’s undoubtedly something for every psych-lover or even if you’re new to the genre packed into this record.

7 Just to hear THE RED PLASTIC BUDDHA do “Clouds” again. Ahhhhhhhhh.

8 Speaking from experience, the only reward for running a project like this (aside from the kick of discovering new music) is seeing that people are taking 10 minutes out of their lives to go and download whatever you’ve put together. It can be a thankless task at the best of times, but as long as their are people like Your Psych Tunes in the corner of the little psychedelic guy & girl, then we’ve got a fighting chance. On the other side of the coin, here are three hands worth of talented musicians giving away their songs for nowt – and you can’t really argue with that can you?

9 If you like Volume 7, then you’ve straight away got another 6 Volumes (all equally as aurally vibrant) ready-made for you and available to download for FREE as well. That’s at least half the summer taken care of.

10 Because UBERFUZZ are on it.

The Psychedelic Gods said “Let there be sound”, and there was sound.

Triptacular, primal, headmelting, sonic melodies that brought them to their knees beneath the holy strobe of kaleidoscopic colour. And The Psychedelic Gods heard it was good – so very fucking fine – but after several triptacular, primal, headmelted, sonic hours of said melodies, they could no longer hear themselves dream and commanded the sound to stop. And stop it did.

But then, as they closed their drug-heavy eyelids weighed down with cosmic visions, they heard something within the thick folds of silence, just a guitar and a voice entwined in The Void. The guitar was acoustic, with uncut strings that rattled magically together, rolling out beautiful and simple lines lifted from faraway days when girls wore flowers in their hair (and some men did too). The voice was simply beautiful, young and gently carrying the timeless wordstreams of one Bob Dylan. The Psychedelic Gods heard it was good and kept their drug-heavy eyelids closed, and as they collectively began remembering, smiles broke out like old black and white flowers on their faces.

Now I’m no Psychedelic God, but that’s pretty much how I feel whenever I listen to Sucks To LaLa Land. As a singer/songwriter, Visalia’s Keith Crain effortlessly loads his songs with promise – here is the unmistakable sound of unconscious raw talent, finding its feet and growing all the time. Cover versions are perhaps an essential part of this process, the study of great songs, dismantling them and singing them again for fun. Even more amazing, is that Keith somehow makes other people’s songs his own, born again in the eardrums, yet armed with the minimum of tools. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still holding out for the first collection of original songs, but in the meantime these eight cover versions of Dylan classics will keep us ticking over expectantly. As an introduction to the sounds of Sucks To LaLa Land, Dylan and Crain are a perfect fit – legendary words of the past reppearing in the present, sung by a brilliant brand-new voice. This isn’t a lazy re-take with a postmodern production twist craving thirty minutes of listening time and fifteen minutes of fame, it’s an unintentional free tribute to an old master that accidentally becomes a bedroom floor testament to a rising star.

Okay, so Dylan isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but arguably his biggest stumbling block has always been his voice. Bob Dylan was a poet rolled into a songwriter – it logically follows that even the most ardent cynics could potentially find something to love on this record with a different voice behind the wheel. There is no guarantee that the best hand-glider makers make the best hand-glider pilots. Keith Crain is undoubtedly one of the best hand-glider pilots I know – he doesn’t take chances, he just… well he glides doesn’t he? And it’s a joy to behear.

For those of you (like me) whose lives were explosively altered and reconfigured by Bob Dylan when you were well under thirty, there is plenty to get excited about. It’s hard to tell if the song choices are pure gold, or whether raiding the Dylan back catalogue is inevitably going to produce results, or even if it’s just that Keith could turn his attention to anything and make it sound that way (check out Daydream Generation 4 for a diamond acoustic version of Radiohead’s “Creep”). Songs like “All I Really Wanna Do” and “It’s Alright Ma” sound suddenly alive again, like hearing them for the first time over. Elsewhere, “Love Minus Zero”, “He Was A Friend Of Mine”, and “Song To Woody” incredibly sound as if they were written for Sucks To LaLa Land to sing.

Curiously for an artist, Keith himself is on the money about his own record saying “Well Under Thirty is a tribute to Bob Dylan. If you like Bob Dylan I’m sure you’ll like this album. If you hate Bob Dylan I hope I can at least show you how powerful his songs were and are. I don’t sing like Bob Dylan. Nor do I play the harmonica. It doesn’t matter”.

The Psychedelic Gods opened their eyes at the end of the record and blinked beneath a canopy of circus stars they’d made together many milleniums ago. “What was that?” they asked in unison.

“Sucks To LaLa Land” said a passing hand-glider maker.

“It’s great!” they blew, motioning for the hand-glider maker to press play again.

And he duly obliged.

Download “Well Under Thirty” for FREE at the Quixodelic Record Store link above

Find out more about SUCKS TO LALA LAND: here

Smallie Wheelies

& Paul Burnout.

The first time I finished listening to My Own Personal Summer of Love, I said to myself, “This is not an album made by experts.”

The second time I listened to it, I realized, “No, it is an album made by people.” And right then, I realized it was exactly what I wanted.

With each additional turn in my CD player, I love the recording even more – In no short part for the emotional weight it carries. The songs are saturated with sorrows, but not dour. At best, they are reflections of change and mental struggle – the gentle, restive ballad ‘Delphi’ involves the suicide of a friend, ‘Raskolnikov’ personifies living clouds of dark dream in terms of Dostoyevsky’s greats, and ‘What A Waste’ (my personal favorite) sings like a deliberate, majestic march to the grave. The rolling, repetitive songs wash a full polyphony of phrases over the listener; each wave punctuated with that familiar, reedy, Scottish tang. After a while, it’s hard not to sing along.

At times the rhythms are truly spectacular (see ‘Casablanca’) as underwritten by Paul’s steady and expressive drumming. Every tune has a different texture: the stage-setter, ‘At The Bus Stop’ is laced with tinkly bells, and ‘Elephant Teapot’ fizzes like a wind-up toy turning circles. As is to be expected from a Personal Summer of Love, some of the songs (mainly ‘Animals’ and ’66’) channel a throwback, psychedelic vibe – chock full of fuzzy guitars and antiphonal, echoing harmonies. Though it’s apparent that the musicians have a deep respect for The Sixties, it is also true that they relive the standards of the decade in a starker, worried light. In the title track, Smallie sings, “It was the summer of love and I was so broke I walked everywhere and the world was weight on my mind so I cut my hair.” If Love is all The Painted Shuts need, then they certainly seem wary of it.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that this album, in reflection, captures the present as well. The dream-like fog of the recordings makes it easy to overlook the emotional significance and immediacy they contain.

This is new psychedelics.

In other words, it’s a problem concerning bread.

The taste and texture of homemade bread may be shocking after eating bleach-white pre-sliced for your whole life, but the homemade deliciousness of this album is beautifully strange enough to make anybody come back for a second helping. The joy of small imperfections and raw, real emotion contained in each earful is truly sustaining. And, maybe, just maybe, this catchy revolution will rip through your brain.

Simon Piler

Seriously, just do yourself a favor and download this album from Cozy Home Records, already!

www.cozyhomerecords.com

“Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.”

- Eugene Delacroix

The boundaries of home recording equipment have been removed for quite some time. Long gone are the days of four-track cassette machines and bouncing; the art of scotch-tape over the protection tabs on Michael Bolton tapes given as gifts from far removed relatives because the store was closed seems almost lost. Digital interface, non-destructive editing, primitive pitch correction, and a galaxy of on-board effects at “reasonably affordable” prices makes analog craft boxes seem archaic and knucklish. The mix tape is gone, the mp3 era as arrived, and the wake created a great wind that set the lo-fi dream ship to sail into the great abyss we call “The Island of Forgotten Toys.”

Or so it was thought.

The latter half of this decade has seen a rejection of this silly idea. While digital recording is nifty and allows for a palette far beyond the capacity or need of many modern musicians, its missing the charm, the soul of tape hiss and natural distortion, the blood of bobbles in the takes, the mistakes that make a song human, the warmth that makes a song honest. This is not necessarily a new idea. Guided By Voices did it way before anyone thought is was cool. Lately bands the likes of the Black Lips and Wavves have been poking out of the mire and grabbing the affections of many purists and old-schoolers. For every group noticed for doing something “new” there always lies a subculture that understands the principles as well or better than the flagships that give it awareness. Fig Mints (of Your Imagination) is a shining example of a band that not only has had a solid grasp of this new ‘old’ sound, but have been at it for several years, culminating to this record, “Exercises in Futility”. It’s from this frame of reference the title is apt.

On the surface this album is unbridled and unkempt. Things are slightly out of tune or minutely out of key. Instruments are pegged and microphones are flattened out by the immensity of the sounds that pummel them. This is the future, ladies and gentlemen. Like track 2, A Change of Season, this record is the sonic equivalent of skipping class with your friends and mocking the world as it toils around you. Its unbounded and focused, yet is fenced by morals and codes that culture seemed hasty to forget. These songs call for normalcy in the midst of hurry, with the understanding that often the express route to normalcy can include a level of self-medication, most clearly represented in the opening track, The Well-Worn Road. What may be most striking about that particular song as well as the rest of the record is its consciousness. The Fig Mints are well aware of what they’re doing, much to our benefit. We are all entrenched in a field of voices, and “Exercises in Futility” sets up camp and is perfectly content to stay where it is and wave to the passing cars.

This is not a complicated record. The songs are ushered and unrelenting, moving like freight in the night. Guitars are towing ever further, yet are not overpowering. Even the solos are conservative and well shaped while commanding and necessary. The understated and restrained rhythm section plants its grooves like furrows in black soil, emerging from its toil to bomb the universe into bending at its every whim. All the while the vocals talk you through, calming and inciting, and always in the drivers seat. The range of the album is great, yet cohesive. Its tantric nature easily takes the mood from darkly introspective (Strung Out Sentries) to warmly reflective (the Stooges-esque My Days At University). The movement of the record as a whole resembles the behavior of a house party. At first all talk is intimate and the ideas are big, the songs are pointed and relaxed, often without drums. As the room fills up, songs like Undead Idea Mines convey a letting go, an acceptance of our own weirdness and the weirdness of others. Further down the line, as the room gets looser, the vibe descends into a lo-fi fuzz fest of whirl and rock and roll, particularly with Don’t Stay There and Its All I Can Do (To Stay Awake).

Down and dirty Ariel Pink kids will love this record. Black-shirted rock kids will love this record. Literate post-secondary astronauts that have learned to enjoy poverty will love this record. “Exercises in Futility” is eerily relevant and strongly appropriate for its time and season.

Wilford Benevolus
Junior Rock Analyst and Amateur Spokesperson for the League of American Wheelmen, Intl.

For more info on “Excercises In Futility” go to: www.cozyhomerecords.com

Out Now!

Here it is! Two years, two states, one retrospective outtakes EP, and five relocations after “Hugs and Smiles” hit the virtual shelves, Fig Mints are back with “Exercises In Futility”!

At the moment, the album is available only through mail orders for $8. Suffice to say, it’s worth it. The songs are his best yet, and it’s been reported that Bobby is only interested in breaking even with the money that he spent putting it out, so show some love and email bobby@cozyhomerecords.com for info on how to buy a copy, or just send your name and address with the payment to:

The last time I felt this way about a debut EP was when Ride dovetailed harmonic white noise into my fifteen year old head like some new configuration of sounds for my life. Then it was the introspective wall of shoegaze, now it is something resembling ghost psychedelics, an intricate tapestry of familiar instruments heard through the tunnel of an aural kaleidoscope. With “Songs About You”, The Space Between Things finally begin their ascent into the wider public consciousness, while giant storm clouds of praise no doubt jostle for position in the wings. This is what musical free-climbing sounds like, scaling the dark face of the universe, a one-man team of musicians with songs as profound as the sounds he produces. Ideas balance on the ledge of melodies, precariously beautiful and intricately menacing.

There is no pomp or calculated swagger about Chris Hobson or the music he makes, everything is about simply being as the four tracks feel their way forward collectively, yet each one is immense and sure-footed in its own right, cascading, ambiguous, explosive, and understated. “Liquid Thought” pulses and murmurs. “Love’s On The Run” is TSBT at its majestic best, travelling over bass and guitar lines while the earth pauses immobile in sudden snapshots outside your window. “Moving For Protection” is arguably the highlight, fusing electric and acoustic forms with haunted jaw-dropping melodies. Closer “NYC Lights For Her” oscillates and peels away like layers of a dream… in the vicinity of My Bloody Valentine, only these songs are ultimately like nothing I’ve heard before. Comparisons are useless and trivial – all you can do is stand back and listen as it leaps across the precipise of possibilities, digging the details and seemingly infinite strokes and touches in search of some impossible sonic perfection.

But for a first offering this comes frighteningly close to some shimmering ideal. After all, self-recorded records are supposed to be clumsy, are they not? Minus the overt blemishes of fluffed notes and human hiss, “Songs About You” sounds somehow other-wordly and sophisticated, testament if anything to the rigours of mixing and mastering it has been subjected to. And I’m led to believe that this is but the tip of the iceberg (or foot of the mountain depending which way you want to look at it) of a vast body of unreleased work, making it all somehow even more exciting. All that’s left to say is I hope that you love it whoever the “You” of the title is, hit from Toronto in a spectral daydream vanishing into the gathering clouds stacking up beyond your shining upturned eyes.

You can download “Songs About You” for FREE (Yes, FREE!) at:

www.thespacebetweenthings.com

or check out their MySpace page at:

www.myspace.com/thespacebetweenthings

*for a further fix of TSBT why not download Daydream Generation 5 and Daydream Generation 6, featuring “Bare Hands” and “Postcard Crimes” respectively…

In an imaginary back bedroom somewhere on your street, Simon Piler and The Atom Band are hunched around a whirring tape recorder that accidentally captures some process of song. The completed record – “Songs From Home” – is a collision of ideas coagulating to form a wonderfully lo-fi compound of sound. Dylanesque bluesy guitar-led folk runs effortlessly into experimental synthetics, random instruments pipe up long-lost melodies and samples of sound texture sputter on in the background. And all the while Simon Piler sings, intelligent heart-felt poetry, the underbelly of America, politically astute, emotionally aware, and unconsciously different. As compounds go, it is the kind of music you hold up in the palm of your hand to the setting sun, temporarily wondering what it is yet knowing implicitly that you don’t just really like it, you feel like it matters much more than any of the polished gems of records that rattle together wrapped up in crumpled critical lists in your oh so heavy 21st century pockets.

It’s far too easy to approach a recording like this where the technology of presentation sometimes sounds if not an afterthought, then definitely deep down near the bottom of the list of priorities. Not everyone enjoys the peculiar flavours of home-brew, content to stuff their shopping trolleys with gallons of corporate nectar, but everyone should be made to stand up and salute the poet who scratches in capital letters the word CREATIVITY first and foremost, allowing everything else to form a disorderly queue after it. You’ve got to expect something to get trampled, right? As it happens, for a lo-fi experimental record, “Songs From Home” rushes down the throat of your ears. It might arguably not quench the unquenchable thirst for a song to end all songs, or a record to end all records, but it is undoubtedly twenty-five minutes of listening time that flies by well spent and a worthy introduction to the prodiguous output of records and videos on Simon’s MySpace page. In particular, the beautiful stripped down gentle guitar and vocal combination on “Muse” (“When i die they’re gonna throw our constellation / they’re gonna throw our stars into the sky”) and the protest closer “Constituent Rock” (“And what I’d like from presidents is forest thick and wild/However it is more likely I’ll be treated like a child”) are clear indications that crafting timeless songs bubbles close to the surface of the Atomic pie cooling on an imaginary window sill of an imaginary back bedroom on your street. You should grab a piece while it’s still hot and feed your headbelly.

Download it for free here:

http://daydreamgeneration.com/site/simon-piler-and-the-atom-band-songs-from-home/

Find out more about Simon Piler & The Atom Band here:

www.myspace.com/simonpiler

Smally

It is 1968 again. Pink Floyd and The Beatles have just been killed in a head-on high-speed collision of colour on your doorstep as you watch like a child from the safety of your bedroom window. You do not understand it, but a tiny droplet of orange breaks free from the technicolour wreckage of sound and seeps into the earth by the roadside. Many years pass, your hair grows, you hide a bong in a shoe-box beneath your bed and listen to loud psychedelic rock music. Outside your window a great orange tree has grown from the ground, its orange leaves glimmering in the orange sunlight, the orange shadows it casts stains everything it touches, rocks, insects, cars, and people. The orange people leave orange footprints on the pavement and in turn everything they touch changes colour too, they kiss in various shades of orange, hang orange curtains from their orange houses, and listen obsessively to a strange record called “The Orange Album” by a band called The Orange Drop that nobody can find.

Once in an orange moon a band comes along that blows your brain clean out out your skull with the sounds they are making. Today to me the moon looks like a great tangerine suspended in the bright blue sky of dawn, and The Orange Drop are that band. Re-inventing 60s psychedelia with a 21st century twist of experimentalism, “The Orange Album” is their second album of the year – bursting at the seams with supersonic guitar riffs, beautiful kooky singing, mighty drums and bass, a Beatle-esque risk-taking dance between styles (who would have thought rhythm & blues piano would lead so well into a tabla?) and digital mind-altering tricks of sound, it is the fanfare of a gang of young musical magicians discovering just how brilliant they really are. Where most bands struggle beneath the weight of self-doubt, The Orange Drop blatantly know that they are onto something and effortlessly sweep you up on the wave of invincibility with them. Take the opening “El Intro Del” with it’s country/druggy-rock prelude and the cackling “I sure hope you’re ready for the ride… woohoo, here we go!”… you just can’t say that sort of thing unless you’ve got a record of aces concealed up your sleeves.

It’s a sprawling, melodic, and mightily impressive record from the word go – the Their Satanic Majesty style medley of sounds (guitar solo frenzy, electronic intermissions, reverberated garage-psych underpinning it all)  of the opening track gives way to the supersonic “Retrogenerica”. Anyone who has heard the Daydream Generation 5 compilation surely couldn’t have missed this one. Think 13th Floor Elevators, a Rebel Rebel guitar, verging on surf, churning up the pop, digging on the past, burning into the future – its one of several highlights no doubt, and yet The Orange Album is more than just a collection of songs that peak and fall. In the hallucinogenic world of The Orange Drop, it’s as much about hedonistic experimentalism on tracks suck as “Alive (The Ken Song)” and “DMT Overdrive” as it is philosophically assured great songwriting. Like “Retrogenerica” I personally prefer it when the song takes centre stage and the ensuing madness escalates around it, but I wouldn’t argue with those of you who prefer their sounds a bit further out. Song-songs like “The Myth Of Sisyphus”, “Children’s Garden” (dig this for an apocalyptic vision of tomorrow – “Nuclear zombies are flopping around/They’re eating all the cigarettes they find on the ground”… genius!), and the gorgeous (I hate that word, but it fits) “Holding The Sun” are The Orange Drop at their catchiest and most accessible.

“Retrogenerica” aside, the stand-out track for me is “My Girlfriend Needs An Exorcism” – since downloading it, it’s rapidly risen to the top of my most played list on my iPod. A comically beautiful ode to a possessed girlfriend, the soundtrack to that Beatles and Pink Floyd car smash, a dancing piano, vocal harmonies from the bright side, and some of the coolest counterbalance of lyrics you have ever heard. Try ”What are you thinking?/Will you stop blinking?/With the puss inside your pretty eyes…” or “She’s got it bad/Satan is her Dad”.

The most exciting thing about The Orange Album is that it sounds like the beginning of something truly amazing (assuming the driving creative forces don’t go and get lost like Brian Wilson out beyond the periphery of reality). It’s a great album on its own, and perhaps even more stunning with its hi-fi sound that it was self-recorded – makes you wonder if the sands of relevance are running out for recording studios and producers – but it leaves you with the unmistakeable feeling that there is more to come. And when it does, well I just don’t know if my brain can take it. I’ve been seeing and hearing in orange for days now – it grows from my feet up and I can see where I’ve been in the night, fluorescent footprints in the garden, up the stairs to the window, the shadow of an orange smile etched into the rain stained window pane, the wreckage of tradition burning in the street below, and the future closing in quickly.

You can download THE ORANGE ALBUM for FREE

at the Quixodelic Record STORE link at the top of this site

or find out more about The Orange Drop at www.myspace.com/theorangedrop

BECKY N: Two Wheels EP

Before I tell you why I love this little record and why you will love this little record, let’s get the lo-fi issue out of the way. Many years from now with a daisy-chain of shining records behind her, Becky N’s swelling army of admirers are going to follow it back to where it all began and dig up “Two Wheels”. An accidental collection of four songs recorded on either side of the planet by a poet with a portable microphone tied to her hair, this record electronically crackles and hisses with 21st century basement bootleg distortion – digitally remastered to iron out as much of the creases as possible, and dressed in effects, if audio-purity is high on your agenda then you’re barking up the wrong musical tree.

However – and this is a mighty big HOWEVER – if, like me, you can hear past hiss and whirr to the heart of music and the song itself, and if you dig the living, breathing atmosphere of lo-fi (a door slams in the background, a chair creaks, hair swishes, a cricket cranes his head to listen) then you’ll quickly hear why so many folk love Becky’s music. The unfortunate thing about it, is that the why it’s so loveable is as intangible as a daydream. Trying to define it, or put it into a box of convenient genre-titling is near impossible – it’s a bit folky I guess, a bit pop, lyrically simple on the surface but blatantly hiding layers and layers, verging on existentialist in the being of lines like “You wrote me a letter from across the swimming pool”, or “Salt tipped tongue tastes/Air full with yellow/Crinkled sand and/A gust under earlobe”. But ultimately it all comes back to the fact that despite it being all these things, it is always that something else, that “other” that makes it really special.

The songs might all be painted with the same Becky N brush, but each one exists in its own right as something worthwhile. The quirky ode of “Pink Flowers”, the colourful landscape of “The Patches”, the sublime and quite brilliant songwriting of “Don’t Ask Me Again What I Dreamt”, and finally the oh so simple melodic yet catchily stratospheric closing “Autopilot”. In fact as the most recent song, “Autopilot” is an ear-watering glimpse at where this could potentially go given some decent recording equipment and really much more of the same behind it. It is a song that sticks in your head like vapours of gum, the cool switch into the magical “I have dreams of wasting away…”, like something from the late 60s, harmonic and other-wordly, and singing like it is purely from a love of singing songs, unpretentious and pretty damn beautiful.

Do I really need to say anymore?

Listen to “Autopilot” from BECKY N’s “Two Wheels” EP:

Download audio file (BeckyN-Autopilot.mp3)

For more info about Becky N visit: http://www.myspace.com/beckynnnn

Download “Two Wheels” for FREE

from the STORE link at the top of this site.

If you spend as much time mining the Internet for new music as I do, then you’ve surely noticed that Canada’s Toronto is rapidly becoming the new capital city of the Psychedelic revival. It would be of no surprise to me should curious social historians later discover that the water had been peppered with hallucinogens, or that the mushrooms being sold in Toronto’s supermarkets were of the magic variety. Go have a listen yourself – band after band emerging into the light of a brand new day to blow your mind, and at the centre of it all the name “The Hoa Hoa’s” (pronounced Wah Wah’s) is a recurring motif. Recently signed to vibrant new independent label Optical Sounds (www.opticalsounds.com), you’d be forgiven for wondering whether this band are truly Torontonian by design, or in actual fact beaming back songs from a decompressed reverb chamber on the bright side of some strange undiscovered moon.

I’ve got to confess that I was rooting for this one even before The Hoa Hoa’s debut album “Sonic Bloom” fell through my letterbox and was rushed like I was a kid at Christmas straight into my hi-fi. The thing is that not only for the last year through snippets of songs I’ve heard here and there have I fallen head over heels for their unique sound, but I@ve also been fortunate enough to have exchanged sporadic emails and am as equally bitten by their attitude. Every message from Hoa Hoa HQ reads like some candy-coloured explosion of words and ideas swooping on a rollercoaster of enthusiasm for what they are doing, and where their music fits into the bigger picture. Now, where once talk of a magical European mystery tour sounded like the stuff of daydreams, over time they have been edging towards it as a reality with equal measures of gutsy determination and beatific grins. The attitude and the songs are one and the same thing – completely infectious. You don’t have to love a band to love the music they make, but likewise you can love a band but grimace uncontrollably (despite your best intentions) when their records play. So when this thing starts I’m doubting that I’ve ever wanted a record to be so good before.

Thankfully it’s not that good. It is fucking great and then some.

Anyone lucky enough to have heard The Hoa Hoa’s live recordings – or luckier still to be geographically within touching distance of their gigs – will not be disappointed. “Sonic Bloom” is alive with the same raw swagger – a head-melting concoction of elements like the swinging sixties, “Anemone” era Brian Jonestown Massacre, wall of reverberated production, pulsating waves of guitars, quirky keyboard riffs, great driving drums that underpin the whole thing, and a deadpan vocal delivery that grows and grows on you like some long lost friend. The resulting brew is a distinguished sound-flavour that swamps the record in their own colour of paint. If you’ve heard The Hoa Hoa’s once, then you’ll know it is them whenever you hear them again.

“Sonic Bloom” is a 15 track full-length debut brimming with gems of songs and would-be psych anthems, kicking off with the brilliant “Yellow Jacket” and rarely taking the foot off the gas from then on in. How can you help but smile at opening lines like “You’ve got a yellow jacket/but you’ve got nowhere to wear it” or the weary comical delivery of “It doesn’t make a bloody difference”. In fact, “Yellow Jacket” epitomises how I hear this band – first listen: pretty damn good; second listen: “oh yeah, actually this is fucking great…”; third listen and I’m unconsciously singing their tunes under my breath wherever I go for days.

So do you want to just go and buy this record now or are you going to make me list all my favourite tracks?

For those of you still reading I suppose let’s take the next logical step and go to track two – “The List” – a thumping VU White Light/White Heat-esque spin-off loaded with Joy Division guitars. The first time I heard this song I thought it was pretty fucking weird. A year later and either I’m getting weirder or my first impression was completely disorientated because “The List” is simply a great song, garage-rock, rolling, explosive, hinting at rebellious punk vibes bristling away below the surface. After “The List” and then the slightly slower paced “I Saw You”, is “Landing On The Moon” with its supercool battlecry of “How does it feel?” and sublimely frantic guitarwork. Together with the brilliant melodic “Lazy & High”, “Landing…” is my favourite of the tracks that I’ve not heard before. Elsewhere “Going Down” sounds like London in the groovy days of Jimi Hendrix but with darker drugs and a lot more reverb. Closing tracks “Circles” and “Happiness…” are fitting, slow sonic ballads to wind the journey down (“the best trip yet” as the band sing on the semi-acoustic tale of implied sexual innuendo that is “Bottles”). And finally of course there is “New Love II” – a shimmering psychedelic work of pure gold and coming together of all the aforementioned elements in one probably record-defining five and a half minute bite-sized chunk. If the radio stations don’t pick this thing up and run with it then… well then fuck the radio stations. As long as we know it exists then everything’s gonna be alright, right? Oh man, I forgot to mention “Mixed” as well – wicked guitar-led riotry – see, I told you that you should’ve just gone and bought the bloody record at the end of the last paragraph.

And so it comes to pass – “Sonic Bloom” does exactly what it says it is, capturing an aurally kaleidoscopic group in their enthusiastic infancy, with petals of great songs unfolding in the sun of your brain like the Hoa Hoa flower they take their name from. It is a very hip, very great record, and as loveable as the personalities behind the music. That it captured the imagination and kicks off an equally exciting prospect as Optical Sounds so that it can someday sit beer-stained and scratched amidst the most loved and played discs in your music collection is not just good news for a ravaged and top heavy music industry, but bonafide proof that sometimes the good guy and the right band comes out on top.

I love The Hoa Hoa’s.

And The Hoa Hoa’s probably love you II.

Listen to The Hoa Hoa’s YELLOW JACKET:

Download audio file (Yellow Jacket.mp3)

Find out more about The Hoa Hoa’s at: www.myspace.com/thehoahoas

Find out more about Optical Sounds and BUY SONIC BLOOM at: www.opticalsounds.com

JANE GILMORE

Knowledge Is Dangerous

Out Today! Download it for free from Daydream Generation Records…

3 years ago I’d fallen into an apathetic musical hole. The records that were gathering dust on my shelves were the same records I’d loved and been playing since my teenage years – Dylan, The Beatles, VU, The Beach Boys, The Kinks, The Stone Roses etc. Occasionally I bought a contemporary much-lauded album, but even if I liked a couple of songs then the longetivity would be consigned to a couple of months in between even thinking about playing them again. Discovering the internet and with it the world of self-publicized home recordings was more than just a musical shot in the mainline vein, it was like discovering a door in the darkness at the bottom of the hole, and opening it to find a whole new world of music hiding behind it. It isn’t a case of elitist snobbery that got me hooked on the Quixodelic fix – it was simply the case that there is so much amazing music getting made on the bedroom floors of the world, and barely enough time to discover all that, let alone have a listen to the NME’s latest plaything. Potentially home recordings have always connected with my brain more than any polished studio recording ever could – here are very real people with very real thoughts, generally writing songs for the love of making music, ideas untainted by the corrosiveness of the dollar. So it’s in that context that the first full length record release by Jane Gilmore is about as exciting and important as it gets in the Quixodelic universe. I’ve been looking forward to “Knowledge Is Dangerous” ever since I first heard Jane Gilmore singing on the Kaleidonaut’s record at the start of this year. It is an anticipation probably resembling that of a 15 year old girl hanging on the next Beatles offering in 1964.

I can’t tell you a great deal about the biographical beginnings and background of Jane Gilmore – where she’s from, what she does, and who she really is. It is as if she wears a deliberate cloak of mystery, like some protective film of distance that allows her the extra space to push the boundaries of her autobiographical style of songwriting further than most of us would (even if we could). The truth is though, that you don’t really need to know where she’s from, what she does, and who she really is because “Knowledge Is Dangerous” says everything you really need to know through it’s songs. To dig any deeper would feel like trespassing where you’re not supposed to be.

Let’s put this into perspective: Jane Gilmore is a low-fi singer/songwriter and this album is a collection of home recordings that were made throughout 2007 and 2008. It won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but for those of you who love your mid-60s folk and the female singers of that golden age, then this record is a must have. Considering how talented she is, the chances are that she won’t be a self-recorded musician forever – but that might not necessarily be a bad thing. “Knowledge…” may be accidentally low-fi by design and lack of options, but I can’t imagine it making such an impression in any other way. So for fan’s of low-fi it’s a classic, but even for those of you who prefer a more polished sound there are a load of songs and 3 great reasons why you should download this record.

The first reason is quite simply the voice. Jane Gilmore can sing and then some – complex harmonies, constantly beautiful, sometimes seemingly improvised like a jazz trumpter searching for notes and perfect melodies. It’s a shining young voice that you could happily listen to all day long and right throught the night. Secondly there’s the words. A voice without the right vehicle and you might as well not sing a thing, but if this record at first glance seems to be about the voice, then with a little bit of listening you’ll soon hear that it is equally about what the voice is singing. Lyrically it’s dense and at times hyper-personal – more the observational-emotional feeling of Beat poetry seeking truths than the abstract-conceptual world of druggy art. The range of words and themes and ideas is so staggering that I could easily fill this entire review lifting some of my favourites. Whether it’s the cutting and surprising ”I’m sorry I won’t be your bitch anymore/I guess its more my style to be a back-stabbing whore” on Et Tu, Brute, or the humorous portrayal of female peers “they only know romance in terms of Orlando Bloom” on It’s A Shame, whether it’s a smile in the face of sadness “I’m going down in a submarine, not a hearse” on Priorities, or insightful Aristotelian word-play “I’d take the harshest truth over the sweetest lie” on the brilliant closing title-track, it feels like snapshots of thoughtstreams, sections of stories, carefully woven poetry, and all of them collide and suck you in and keep you mesmerised. The strength of the lyrics is made even stronger by the fact that the vocals are not buried under an ocean of effects. Under normal circumstances I’m a big fan of the voice as another instrument and as such like to hear what can be done with just the right amount of compression, reverb and other assorted distortion electronics. But here, the absence of manipulation really works – the poetry of the lines are starker, more intimate, more audible and thus somehow more real. Nothing gets lost, nothing is for show, and every word seems to matter at a very primitive level.

Finally it’s the magic of the songs that makes “Knowledge…” so important. There are so many good ones and a few really great ones. In fact so great are some of them, that it seems like a strange choice to kick the record off with a cover version – albeit an alternatively fashionable and brilliantly done cover of Neutral Milk Hotel’s “Holland, 1945″. My own favourite picks are the bluesy pop of “Home Again”, the vocal acrobatics that carry “Monday Is Love, Tuesday Is Want” , the aforementioned closing track “Knowledge Is Dangerous” (a wistfully incise and poignantly perfect ending), and the brilliantly understated and intimate “Priorities”. I can’t stop there without briefly mentioning second track “This War” – a song that will no doubt generate Joan Baez flashbacks all round. It’s a brave statement, not in what she is saying, but actually having the bottle to record it. Peace songs in the 21st century have the horrible tendency of sounding twee and artificial, but Jane Gilmore seems to approach her song subjects like she does her singing, taking chances, and even the most cynical of cynics surely can’t help but feel the sincerity of a line like “I don’t like to be political/I want to keep these thoughts to myself”. There is unquestionable brilliance in being able to express what so many of us think and feel, but can only get out in the form of some clumsy pastiche of the hippy era.

“This War” is one of the rare occasions that “Knowledge Is Dangerous” speaks in a universal genderless language. By in large – and undoubtedly by the virtue of its autobiographical nature – Jane Gilmore songs have a distincly feminine feel to them. From a man’s perspective it is a unique glimpse into the engine room of a complex female brain. Does it make things any clearer? Probably not. If anything it somehow manages to make women seem even more complex and confusing – assertive one moment, fragile the next, tears of laughter, and laughter to hide the tears. Just like a woman, the record as a whole is a beautifully complex sum of parts, sounding like a magical scrapbook of song that you find under somebody else’s bed. And the greatest thing is that it won’t always sound like a scrapbook of song, but it will sound more and more like a scrapbook of bonafide internal history with every passing day. Record companies can throw money at bands to fill stadiums and sell t-shirts, and fill cash registers, but it is records like this that will someday fire the imagination of sociological sound historians curious about this generation, what makes us tick, what got us scared, and what put smiles on our faces.

I’ve said probably more than enough about how and why I love this record so much. If I haven’t convinced you by now to go and download it (for free) then nothing will. The worst thing about reviewing records you feel so strongly about is that it is impossible to do justice to them no matterhow hard you try to put that feeling into what you write. Truthfully though, if there isn’t something to love about a record then I won’t even think about putting pen to paper – and if you haven’t got something good to say about someone’s labour of love, then simply don’t say anything at all. Sure, there’s a degree of objectivity in taste (irrespective of what philosophers or folk with bad taste would have you believe) but there’s also a big old grey area of subjectivity and because of this, there will always be someone to suggest you give a record a spin. So here I am in that big old grey area of subjectivity – I’ve given you objective reasons for why “Knowledge Is Dangerous” is so important (the voice, the words, and the songs) and all that’s left for me to say is subjectively I love this record and maybe you might subjectively love it too.

Download Jane Gilmore’s “Knowledge Is Dangerous” at the DGRECORDS store/link at the top of this site, and if you dig it enough then please donate a little of your hard earned cash by clicking “donate” and helping an artist who has agreed to put their music out for free. Unlike most sites where you can download music, the Daydream Generation does not take a percentage, every penny goes directly to the artist. Which is how it should be after all.

Find out more about Jane Gilmore at: http://www.myspace.com/janegilmore

or listen to “Priorities” from “Knowledge Is Dangerous”:

Download audio file (Jane Gilmore - Priorities.mp3)

*For now there is a temporary technical glitch with the “donate” button at the DG store, but we’re working to fix it. If you’re determined to show some love though you can still find a donate link on Jane Gilmore’s MySpace page. Cheers.