Modern bands fascinated by all things psychedelic do not only listen to the ‘old masters’ but probably also what each other is doing. And that is a good thing because you don’t have necessarily to imitate or emulate what other is doing, you can also combine and push things further into new directions. The list is quite large, but Tame Impala King Gizzard and The Wizard Lizzard, Lemon Twigs, are the modern psychedelia purveyors that have to be pointed out right off the bat. After listening to the Shadowgraphs new album “Venomous Blossoms”, I’m adding these guys to the list.
This Charlotte, North Carolina band’s third album practically covers the ground all of the above three mentioned bands explore - one moment they are in the poppy territory of Lemon Twigs, the other the spacey explorations of Tame Impala, the third in explorations of the psychedelic medium as such in thought (and not necessarily in style) as King Gizzard can. The key lies with the composing/singing duo of Bryan Olson and Wins Glade who are not only totally immersed into a certain musical style but obviously have the feeling and knowledge to make it all sound fresh and new.
Of course, you can hear the snippets of all those familiar sounds from The Beatles (“Countryside”) and Floyd (“Space Medusa”), to even The Monkees (why not?) Neil Young (“Eastern Holiday”), to now almost forgotten The Moody Blues and something not heard so often in those musical woods like the Tropicalia of Os Mutantes (“Bossa Supernova”). Still, it is only more in sketches and it is nothing you can really (or want to) pinpoint, just a sense, and a feeling. On their Bandcamp page, the guys say that they “really wanted to push the ‘genre’ in a bunch of directions for fun.” It doesn’t really matter whether they did it for fun or out of being serious - what is evident that they have produced good, modern psychedelic pop sounds.
If they did have great fun doing it (and it seems they did), even better. It will ensure that everybody who listens to this album will have the same fun too.
