Austin Psych Fest has quickly become the benchmark psych festival on the planet, growing in stature each year while still retaining its core values. Below you can watch the 2012 event in full. It’s only 240p resolution on You Tube but hey, its better than nothing right? The good news is that they’ve also made the concert film Beyond The Third Sound of last year’s festival … Continue reading WATCH: Austin Psych Fest 2012 (in full)
Swervedriver return with their first single in 15 years. Deep Wound has been floating around for a while now with the footage in the clip below taken from their studio performance for radio station KEXP in Seattle back in April 2012. The single is available now via iTunes, Amazon and the band’s Bandcamp page backed with a dub version called Dub Wound. The single includes backing … Continue reading NEW MUSIC: Swervedriver | Deep Wound
Three separate strains of psychedelic rock were on display at Goodgod with locals Blind Valley kicking things off in confident fashion. A quartet with a sound built around big Tame Impala-styled riffs, impressively melodic bass playing, Led Zeppelin atmospherics and a farfisa organ made them a varied and entertaining opening act. The arriving crowd responded in fashion, quickly filling that too often empty void in … Continue reading LIVE REVIEW: The Murlocs, Los Tones, Blind Valley @ Goodgod Small Club (15/11/13)
The Grand Rapids’ debut album possesses a striking sense of purpose and confidence. This isn’t the skinny, frazzled-nerve psych rock that many contemporary acts trade in, this is muscular music; widescreen and bold. They employ many of the classic elements of drone and psych rock (effects, repetition and tumbling rhythms) but nothing sounds particularly generic, referencing all manner of rock from Jane’s Addiction to The … Continue reading ALBUM REVIEW: The Grand Rapids | Great Shakes
Returning with their first album in seventeen years, it quickly becomes apparent that time doesn’t equate to change in the world of Mazzy Star. That is of course a good thing if you are fan of their earlier work as here they take those key elements of Hope Sandoval’s breathless, sensual voice and David Roback’s spacious, drifting musical canvases and wrap them around a batch … Continue reading ALBUM REVIEW: Mazzy Star | Seasons of Your Day
The third album from Melbourne’s The Ancients is a record that hurtles, ambles and breezes by with equal amounts of intricate musicality and simple skewed-pop broad strokes. There is a wistful 60s folk tinge to songs like House of Cards, the lighter contrast to their more layered and dense psych excursions such as the shoegaze haze of Hamster and the epic Molokai that manages to … Continue reading ALBUM REVIEW: The Ancients | Night Bus
Pond are and forever will be compared to Tame Impala, with whom they share a few members, and yes they both trade in retro-fitted psychedelic rock but dig below the surface and the two bands are clearly circling different planets. On Hobo Rocket they’ve pulled back on the overblown eccentricities that were generally to their detriment and produced a concise, freewheeling and fun album. The … Continue reading ALBUM REVIEW: Pond | Hobo Rocket
Sydney’s Sister Jane are releasing Whole Wide World, the first single from their new album, on October 15th and have kindly sent a pre-release stream out into the digital aether. It finds them sounding impressively widescreen with tumbling drums, reverb-laden guitars peeling off all corners of the canvas and vocals that resonate with lush melodicism and barely contained urgency. There’s a decidedly UK post punk/indie … Continue reading NEW MUSIC: Sister Jane | Whole Wide World
Wellington, NZ band The Golden Awesome are heading to Melbourne for a handful of shows in October after they support Beach Fossils in their hometown later this month. If you’re a fan of dense, layered hypnotic rock music then you’ll want to get along and check them out. They continue the same psych lineage of bands like MBV, Lush, Ride and JAMC while also tipping … Continue reading TOUR NEWS: The Golden Awesome announce Melbourne shows
If you see King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard live odds are you’ll be smitten with their rambling garage psych rock. It feels loose but it hits hard. Their debut LP 12 Bar Bruise was mighty fine and then they went and followed it up with the mystifying and not particularly great concept LP Eyes Like The Sky. Now you can hear the excellent I’m Not … Continue reading NEW MUSIC: King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard | I’m Not A Man Unless I Have A Woman
by Chris Familton The years roll by but New Zealand seems to have the consistent knack for throwing up bands that continue the lineage that was formed in the early 80s while still carving out a niche for themselves in the overcrowded world of left-of-centre guitar rock. Popstrangers have already released a stellar record this year and now Ghost Wave have turned potential into an … Continue reading ALBUM REVIEW: Ghost Wave | Ages
by Chris Familton Mix small town pessimism, youthful optimism, suburban nihilism and a lo-fi aesthetic and you have some of the ingredients that make the essential sound of Bad//Dreems on their superb Badlands EP. The Adelaide natives have been teasing/threatening us for a while now with a string of singles (Chills, Tomorrow Mountain and Caroline) and now those songs plus another trio of equally terrific … Continue reading REVIEW: Bad//Dreems | Badlands EP
Doubtful Sounds 