New Psychic Ills - "Mantis"
Psychic Ills deserve more listeners. The New York quartet's second album Mirror Eye is a smooth blend of heady psychedelia, Eastern-tinged raga dub, minimal Kraut electronics, and improvisational synthesized space rock that congeals into one 30-minute head trek. You get loops, Spacemen 3 "sitar" music, phased clatters, Sun City Girls-style instrumentals, and undulating hand drums, all played through a hallucinatory haze. It's hard to get a sense of the places Mirror Eye takes you after listening to a single cut -- because, as mentioned above, the eight tracks work together to propel the listener deeper into Psychic Ills' project -- but here's the opening track "Mantis" to get you started on the journey.
Psychic Ills - "Mantis" (MP3)
Mirror Eye is out 1/20 via The Social Registry. You can hear more of it at the band's MySpace. If you're looking for more "song-based" works, check out "Fingernail Tea."
[Photo by Blossom Berkofsky]
Posted at 4:21 PM by brandon in MP3
Tags: Psychic Ills
pfft
Score = -3
Last year, some sound guy at SXSW gave them a hard time, and they responded by playing what was surely the most sinister set of the whole festival. I thought the bad vibes were going to materialize into giant hands and wring that dork's neck. I am really looking forward to this album.
Score = 3
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Score = -4
I'm digging this sound - it's like what lal meri and School of Seven Bells have going with the world psych vibe, but a bit more, erm, expansive.
Sadly, since most of the iNteRnEt CoMmUNiTy can't take the time to learn to splel rihgt, I can't imagine many people having the attention span to sit through anything rolling past the three minute mark... too bad, these guys are rockin' it. Or raga'in it. Or whatever.
Score = 0