I've never been one for the vinyl hype. That's not to say I don't
appreciate the needle-altered rendition of vintage LPs like Highway
61 Revissited, Pet Sounds, or Axis: Bold As Love, but rather that
I've found it hard to buy into the modern vinyl hype: it's all well
and good to buy them as collectors' items, for the artwork, or just
because you're really craving that authentic turntable-hiss, but to
buy a newly manufactured mainstream radio-commodity like Bieber or
Gaga on vinyl because it “sounds better” is just unwarranted
pretension. If you are going to bother with the Compact Disc's
12-inch forefathers however, I can't help but feel that the following
three albums are so shamelessly clothed in scratchy, shellac
sensibilities you'd probably be forgiven for giving them a spin.
Painted Palms- Forever (2014)
Having
recently
release their first full-length effort Forever,
I
feel Painted Palms are an act who are yet to garner the recognition
they deserve.
Playing
sunny
Brian
Wilson-informed
pop,
Louisiana-raised
cousins Reese
Donohue and Christopher Prudhomme first
started making
music in the form
of 'hypnotic sound experiments and song fragments'1
which
they would swap between each other
whilst
Donohu
was
away and school in California,
and Prudhomme in New Orleans. After
the
duo
officially
banded up as Painted Palms following
a reunion in
the winter of 2009 they
continued
collaborating
on tracks by phone and email: eventually
leading to the release of their debut EP
Canopy
in
2011.
Whilst
at its core their music is fundamentally a
digital patchwork of the two musician's independent creative inputs
stitched
together
on
a computer,
their
pop-powered
psych-rock
soaked
sound,
brimming
with reverb-drenched
vocal
hooks
and
raucous phasered-riffs in songs like Spinning Signs, and
broken
up by
hazy
surf rock excursions
like Sleepwalking,
shows an
understanding of the
art of album-composition that
puts them in
in
refreshingly
pre-digital
light
and surely
deserves being committed to vinyl.
Temples- Sun Structures (2014)
Hailed by many as another beacon of the
psych-rock revival so intuitively embodied in the expertise of Kevin
Parker's Tame Impala, Temples'
eagerly-awaited Sun Structures, fully
met the expectations set by Shelter Song in
2013. A fluid
twelve song pantheon of lysergic,
Byrds-bleached
melodies, their
chromatic debut is solid
through-and-through. Unpinning
their first full-length with
a backbone of self-assured snares,
cinematic strings,
harp flourishes, and
blues-read bass
and guitar, the Kettering
four-piece confidently
purvey
their sound across
the breadth of the album:
from
the verdant,
record-ready Shelter Song
opener, through
the mysterious
glam-gloam lands of songs
like Colours to Life, and finally
to the
pensive Round-Table-rock
conclusion
of Fragment's
Light. Engaging
and consistent, this is pop-friendly psych that's
rearing for a turntable.
Foxygen - We Are The 21st Century
Ambassadors of Peace & Magic (2012)
Ray
Davis-reared Californian's
Jonathon Rado and Sam France have already achieved a disconcertingly
analogue vibe on their third full length effort We
Are The 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic.
Renowned
for their “unhinged stage antics”,2
the
high-school friends have
embroidered a nine-track
patchwork of
psych-rock
ditties,
dip-dyed
in Dylan-drawls
in
songs like No
Destruction,
gleaming
with clean
Kinks-y-choruses
in San
Fransisco,
and going
so far as to
flirt with
bebop
in numbers
like
Bowling
Trophies.
Brushing
shoulders with
Jagger-forged rock
sneers, silken bluesy-licks
and self-aware lyrics that show they
know well the
sixties-stunt
they're
pulling,
frontman
France declaring
“Oh
I got the movies and a discotheque
inside my mind / all the time, all night yeah / I'm feeling groovy”
in
Oh
Yeah.
At a nimble
nine tracks long,
LP
number three is an
arresting and intoxicating
rock
romp
that's
ripe
and ready for the record.
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