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Psych Reviews For November
Josefin Öhrn + The Liberation - Horse Dance
Like Dream All Over, Horse Dance has a strong opener in 'Dunes'. The track's repetitive backing throbs make it virtually impossible to resist nodding along. What do you call it when you end up nodding along with the whole of your physical frame? A full body nod? That's what I was doing anyway. As with Gun Outfit, there's a Neu! thing going on here but this time it's executed in a far cleaner, less ragged and fuzz-free way. It's the kind of glistening psych you'd imagine that bloke from LCD Soundsystem streams through his 4G lapel button while designing luxury furniture or whatever he does these days. The music floats along like a Phil Manley or Jonas Munk solo release, albeit with a charismatic Swedish lass whispering over the top, Josefin sounding cool to the point of jaded disinterest. I realise I'm unintentionally making Horse Dance come across as an odious hipster elevator soundtrack, a maliciously gentrifying corruption of the nebulous Rocket label, but it's actually really neat because you can't just listen to hairy males stomping on distortion pedals all your life, mate. Historically, psych-rock has been a proper sausage fest and the likes of Josefin Öhrn (and Carrie Keith, see above) show there are viable alternatives to the vacuous psych of the Cyruses.
Capra Informis - Womb Of The Wild
I am reliably informed that Capra Informis is Latin for "shapeless goat", which is apt because this is a new project from one member of the Swedish world-music psych-fusion collective Goat, specifically their "unnamed djembe player".......Maybe it's too early to judge from this slight EP but I may like its shapeless side-project more than the proper, solidly-formed Goat. The latter band can be excessively exuberant at times, whereas Womb Of The Wild stays slow, understated and om-like. The first song's a meditative chant with blurred edges. The title piece is more riff-based and nasty-sounding, with sinister hints of Dead Skeletons or the Tomahawk tracks where Mike Patton channels his Native American ancestry. The organ-licious final number, on the other hand, sounds like a missing scene from Phantom Of The Opera where Erik naffs off to a Moroccan hippy retreat for some much-needed holistic bongo therapy.
See the full piece here: The Quietus
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