Self Released (label)
28 October 2020 (released)
28 October 2020
There’s a new super-troupe in town. Emerging from the session-musician shadows is Lins Wilson who’s enlisted Leeds compatriots Tom Hudson (Pulled Apart By Horses) and Nestor Matthews (Sky Larkin, Menace Beach) to create this pre-punk primeval psyche-rock collection under the Magick Mountain banner. As they pronounce on the rifftastic ‘Cherokee’ ‘All hail!’.
Being in the background provides a perfect purview for the nuts and bolts of the tasks in hand. Being a gun for hire means you know where the bodies are (you put ‘em there). Being an auxiliary enables you to cherry-pick and glean the best bits of groupmanship leaving out the unnecessary flab and flotsam. All this is in full evidence here: the like-minded meeting psyche-blinded.
On ‘Weird Feelings’ this power trio (re)combine Jon Spencer’s explosive raw rock and roll roots/routes, Rocket from the Crypt’s tomb-stoner chooglin’, The Groundhogs’ bluesy-boozy-woozy endeavours and The Edgar Broughton Band’s head-dazzling frazzling sermons. More acid than speed, more placid haste than heed, a steady sup and a sip than an out-there head trip it’s a hallucinogenic traipse through mud-spattered lenses. However, the clarity of vision is undimmed by the crunching grunge-garage atmospherics (fuzz-scuzz-buzz guitars, thumping ‘n grindin’ basslines, thundering drumskins) and the chiming inter-changing harmonising of Wilson and Hudson that is at turns ethereal, elysian and empyrean.
‘Brown Bread’ is pure proto-punk (the cascading opening has shades of the Sex Pistols’ ‘Submission’), a supreme slice of skewed rock repetition twisted into subterranean subjugation. Down, down, deeper and six feet down.
Where the ‘Dream Chaser’ is an eyes wide open detour into the night’s darkest densities and intensities ‘The Creeper’ is a proggy notion that details that interstitial space and time between (a)wake and sleep, conscious and unconscious, when the physical being cedes territory to the outer-sensory orbits, charting the darting supernatural satellites that inform our psychic states. A far-out freakzone where getting out of your head means you don’t lose it.
This is an album that expertly draws from that hinterland between the post-60s head rush comedown that (d)evolved into the 70s ambivalence towards the hippy-hippy shakedown, when rock was king and collective dreams needed taking by the scruff of the neck. A statement of power, poise and noise.
