There’s something electrifying about a record that feels forged in the cracks between shifts, under fluorescent lights, and in the ache of repetition. Muffled Ears, the World Sounds Bad Quality, the new full-length from Reading’s Sightseeing Crew, pulses with that energy. It’s a record that grabs modern disorientation by the collar and turns it into something cinematic.
Written over a year split between manual graft, bar shifts, and desk hours, this is a body of work that understands routine from the inside. You can feel the grind in its rhythm, but instead of sinking under that weight, Sightseeing Crew explode it outward. The result is a kaleidoscopic blend of swirling sax lines, expansive guitar atmospheres and melodies that feel slightly bent out of shape.
Category: psychedelic rock
Vast, the fourth studio album from Vermont’s Wet Tuna to make its way to vinyl and first since 2022, presents a wide-screen slab of irreverent, playful psychedelia that could have only come from the hands / brain / interstellar groove telescope of Matt “MV” Valentine.
Over the course of ten tracks you are hit with slice after slice of pleasantly disorienting, secretly whip-tight rural funk that is truly out of time. One tune in you start to feel gravity lighten your grip to the earth. By track three that lightness gives way to a distinct “when was this recorded?” vibe. 1960? 2170? 2280? By jam ten you’ve been so soaked in the aura that you no longer care as you know that you are here now. Where else have you ever been? Or wanted to be?
Glasgow’s Helicon and Los Angeles-based producer and DJ Al Lover have joined forces on a bold new collaborative album, Arise, due for release February 13th 2026 on Fuzz Club. “Arise confronts a culture of individualism at the mercy of opportunistic grifters,” says frontman John-Paul Hughes, “offering a reminder that empathy, compassion, and authenticity are still choices.” Reflecting that tension, Helicon and Al Lover deliver a maximalist, uplifting sound with a baggy, hypnotic pulse — fusing Helicon’s trademark psychedelia with Al Lover’s genre-bending electronics.
Produced by Tony Doogan (Mogwai, The Jesus & Mary Chain) at Castle Of Doom Studios in Glasgow, the result is a dense, hypnotic and fiercely rhythmic record that layers trip-hop breaks…
New Zealand duo Earth Tongue were no strangers to hellish distortion and Satanic psychedelia before teaming with Ty Segall to record their third full length, Dungeon Vision. The pair’s talent for top-volume riffs, sinister vocal harmonies, and overpowering performances that are both tight and chaotic at once defined their sound for much of their discography. With Segall’s help, Earth Tongue don’t necessarily amplify their demonic psych heaviness as much as they bring it to a new level of singed crispiness.
There’s a bit more of a prog sensibility to the blazing guitars and odd time signature grooves of the title track, as with the Black Sabbath-meets-King Crimson sludginess of “Watchtower.” When Earth Tongue’s Gussie Larkin and…
Bloody Head have been lurking at the fringes for some ten years now, occupying a greasy, hard-to-clean crevice where noise-rock and psychedelia begin to intermingle. In this time they’ve tottered, threatened, collapsed and cajoled, their unexpected incursions akin to having a mysterious, slightly cracked ‘character’ glom onto you at the pub. Like said pub weirdo, they charm and bemuse and recount tall tales, all while a violent sense of mania flickers intermittently behind the eyes.
Bend Down and Kiss the Ground comes hot on the heels of last year’s excellent Perpetual Eden, and hews close to that album’s rangier, slightly-more-streamlined sound. Things remain ugly and warped, but they’re keeping up their attempts at sprucing and spritzing: submitting…
In January 2021, unassuming clubbers looking for a Saturday night out at Taipei’s FINAL might’ve been surprised to encounter Taiwanese drone-doom duo Scattered Purgatory flooding the room with noise, in what was billed as their last performance. Yet the duo had already been toying with the boundary between the city’s rock and electronic scenes; guitarist Lu Jiachi, who cut his teeth in the stoner rock band Sleaze, dabbled in deconstructed club music throughout the late 2010s, eventually putting out tracks for local labels like JIN, OverMyBody, and Sea Cucumber. Five years after that cacophonous “farewell” show, the band is back with an album that builds on their foundation of Earth-esque guitar-and-bass rumbling, incorporating more bite-sized song…
Portland-based duo Natural Magic’s II was the final vinyl release that Keith McIvor aka JD Twitch put into production before his untimely departure in late September ’25.
“Having been a long time lover of everything krautrock, space rock, experimental and psychedelic it seems more than fitting that he leaves us this LP as his parting gift; because this sublime album is all these things wrapped up into one and much more.
The album’s opening track “Galaxy Builder”, with its driving tempo, monolithic bass and screaming guitars might give the impression we’re about to hear a Neu for the 21st Century, but no, by the 2nd track we’re already on the first of several wild detours into uncharted territories…
Geologist is the nom-de-théâtre of Brian Weitz, whose pursuits have been an active part of the music underground since since he was 15, playing and working in alignment with an organic ensemble of friends that would one day choose to call what they were doing Animal Collective. Can I Get a Pack of Camel Lights? migrates from that tradition, containing a number of surprise affects of its own. #1 is that it is the first-ever proper Geologist solo album! For real. Surprise #2 is its pursuit of a musical answer to the not-oft-enuf-ast question: what if, back in the 80s, Ethan James had made a hurdy gurdy album for SST?
Geologist’s affirmative answer to the question begins with another question — Can I Get a Pack of Camel Lights?.
A stark surprise arrives midway through Not Here Not Gone, the fourth album from ethereal doom quartet Blackwater Holylight. Soon after the guitar feedback of “Heavy, Why?” fades into silence, a distorted techno beat wobbles into that void, like some industrial band’s approximation of dub. The rhythm is a guest spot from Dave Sitek, the TV on the Radio multi-instrumentalist who has made something of a second home at Sonic Ranch, the Texas studio where Blackwater Holylight cut this record. A tide of noise steadily surrounds the beat, two very different forces competing briefly for the same space.
That track, “Giraffe,” may feel like a goof or even a gimmick, a convenient break amid 45 minutes of brawny riffs and martial drums.
There are times, listening to Richard Bishop do his thing with Sun City Girls, when this reviewer thinks, “Everyone else can stop playing their guitars now.” A few of those moments occur at points during the 92 minutes of music included on Three Lobed’s reissue of tracks from two of the Sun City Girls’ late-1980s Cloaven Cassettes: Famous Asthma (1987) and Tibetan Jazz 666 (1988). For listeners not tuned in to the vagaries of the Sun City Girls’ prolific output, the Cloaven Cassettes were self-released tapes, often composed of performances of the band at its loosest and weirdest, and the Sun City Girls could get very, very weird. Most of what you’ll hear on this reissue is the Bishop brothers and Charles Gocher in improvisation, working a blend of mutant jazz,…
One of the best West Coast folk-rock/psychedelic bands, Love may have also been the first widely acclaimed cult/underground group. During their brief heyday they drew from Byrds-ish folk-rock, Stones-ish hard rock, blues, jazz, flamenco, and even light orchestral pop to create a heady stew of their own.
Love’s The Complete Elektra Albums includes the definitive selection of Arthur Lee and company’s inimitable work. In addition to newly remastered versions of 1966’s Love and Da Capo and the landmark Forever Changes (1967), this box also includes the CD debut of Lee’s original mix for 1969’s Four Sail plus a disc of single sides and rarities that appeared on a series of early ’00s CD reissues of these albums.
Formed in California in 1967, Children of the Mushroom were the quintessential garage-psych band. As the times evolved, the band hardened their sound, shortening their name to Mushroom. Jerry McMillen remembers the start: “The initial issue: every member was quite novice on their instrument.” He continues, “Al began playing bass, Dennis took up drumming, and Mark McKean and I both handled guitars. We were already developing original compositions beyond the cover songs we performed—that might have been the catalyst.”
By 1970, Mushroom became Lady, incorporating prog-rock influences and instruments like flute to their hard-pych organ/guitar dominated sound, drawing inspiration from bands like Jethro Tull, Steamhammer, Gypsy or Bloodrock.
London’s groundbreaking psychedelic pioneers, still led by founder Paul Rudolph along with former Hawkwind bassist and Lemmy protegé Alan Davey, return for a brand new album Covered In Pink cover songs. The Fairies tear into some of the classic rock’s biggest monuments from “American Woman” to “Mississippi Queen” to “Baby’s On Fire” and “Communication Breakdown” PLUS a brand new version of their proto-punk hit “Do It” and original tune. Includes special guest appearances by Nik Turner (Hawkwind co-founder), Michael Moorcock (Hawkwind) and Danny Faulkner (Pre-Med).
The excessive, drug-fueled Pink Fairies grew out of the Deviants, a loose-knit band formed in 1967 by members of the West London hippie commune Ladbroke Grove.
Like with any other rock genre (or sub-genre), the death of psychedelic rock has been proclaimed so many times that the proclamation itself became redundant. The reasons may seem quite simple – the appeal of psych rock remains to this day, whether in its original or ever-coming changes in shape or form, with the original core (and ideas) remaining intact in one or more elements that define psych rock as such.
With Under Dark Skies, their latest album, Los Angeles outfit Tombstones in Their Eyes just prove the point. With the band going through intense personal changes (including the passing of guitarist Paul Boutin this October), the band still firmly remains in the songwriting hands of John Trainor, one of its original founders,…
If you’re tapped into the right corners of the underground, Winged Wheel are a supergroup. Recruiting a member of Sonic Youth — arguably the greatest experimental rock band of all time, and inarguably one of the most popular — certainly bolsters that designation.
But even before Steve Shelley got behind the kit for 2024’s Big Hotel, the “creatively and geographically scattered collective” was an impressive assemblage of talent. More importantly, the music lives up to the pedigree.
The band began as a remote file-trading operation early in the decade, deep in the dregs of the pandemic. The players: Chicago-based Whitney Johnson, who releases music as Matchess and plays in Circuit Des Yeux; Cory Plump,…
It’s been a year and a half since BASIC first emerged out of a bare bones set up of two guitars (Chris Forsyth and Nick Millevoi) and a drum machine. That early experiment, inspired by the 1984 collaboration between Robert Quine and Fred Maher, put a boxy, machine-drilled framework around open-ended guitar jam. Mikel Patrick Avery tended the rough propulsion of the drum machine, enriching its stutter with additional improvised percussion, while Forsyth and Millevoi slashed away at one another on conventional and baritone guitar. It was, at once, disciplined and free-spirited, and you can see why it appealed to Forsyth. Christian Carey reviewed the full-length debut last year, writing “With a rattling drum pattern, synth lines embellished by bent notes…
There’s J.D. Salinger, there’s Thomas Pynchon, and then there’s Takashi Mizutani, founder, singer and guitarist of Japanese psychedelic rock giants Les Rallizes Dénudés. How and why could someone so obviously gifted, perhaps even touched by the divine, remove themselves from a world that not only inspires their art but adores it? This question plagued some of the most dedicated and maniacal record collectors in the world, the deepest heads with the most fried and obscure psych rock platters, until 2021 when The Last One Musique and Temporal Drift opened the floodgates and let the music stream forth. It’s curious to think that if Mizutani had emerged from hiding before his death in 2019, perhaps he might have enjoyed the exposure, much in the way…
…Remastered by Helge Sten.
Back in 2008, Motorpsycho MK3 was beginning to gel and settle. Kenneth Kapstad’s entry into the band a year earlier had not only started to inspire a new and different writing, as shown in their first album, Little Lucid Moments, but also given the musicianship a solid kick up the behind. By summer 2008 the engine room was back to firing on all cylinders, ushering in a new era of intense and ambitious work for the band.
In hindsight it’s hard to quite remember the sequence of events, but some time early in 2008, an invitation to play the Terrastock Festival in Louisville dovetailed with an opportunity to fulfill the long held ambition to record at Electrical Audio with Steve Albini.
Radiance Opposition is the tenth album by Julie’s Haircut, one of Italy’s most enduring independent musical outfits: a band that has developed a genuine sonic catalogue through the years and which makes a renewal move with this record, their first full length since 2019.
With a title taking inspiration from the I Ching book of divination, and a six piece lineup introducing new singer and songwriter Anna Bassy joining the consolidated team formed by Nicola Caleffi, Luca Giovanardi, Andrea Rovacchi, Andrea Scarfone and Ulisse Tramalloni, Radiance Opposition collates an eight tracks cycle that generates a consistent yet multifaceted musical journey, combining psychedelia, electronica and polyrhythms – all blended together thanks to a syncretic…
Osees have released their new live album, Live at the Broad Museum via Deathgod Records. Album captures a dynamic live performance at The Broad museum in Los Angeles. The record features extended tracks that highlight the band’s improvisational energy, including a standout 22-minute jam, “I Got a Lot.” Unlike their tightly structured studio recordings, this album explores krautrock-inspired grooves, hypnotic rhythms, and experimental soundscapes, showcasing the band’s versatility and adventurous live presence.
The album is mixed by frontman John Dwyer and mastered by JJ Golden, emphasizing the raw, immersive quality of the performance. Critics praise it as a document of Osees’ live power, capturing moments of spontaneous creativity…