Psychic Lemon shoot you up then shoot you down with their monolithic slabs of space rock mashed with dance groove commitment. Their new album, Freak Mammal is a punishing adventure beyond time or reason, pushing every mother fucking boundary.
‘Afrotopic Bomb’: The strict rigidity of the song forces it into a huge edifice. This is a skyscraper set to music. This is architecture in groove. Resident of it’s own time-skin; never ending and changeless.
‘Dark Matter’ sees Massive Attack’s ‘Angel’ set to motorway rock on a crumbling pathway to oblivion. The wagon, packed with explosives. Mudguards splattered in blood and oil. The driver, covered in sweat. Veins popping. Dead behind the eyes. Nightmare without end.
‘Free Electro Collective’ sounds like a French beat poet’s existential crisis.
‘Seeds of Tranquility’ has an echo of The Black Angels ‘Empires’, but swapping gunship heroin runs for Chinese Junks in the Opium Wars as smoke rises languidly from the guitars.
‘White Light’ hits like Julian Cope’s ‘Hanging out & hung up on the line’, co-opting the arch-Drude’s ur-rock and speed-ing it up. We’re back to the motorway as Psychic Lemon live for speed until the fucking axles break.
Psychic Lemon drop rhythms in and out of the songs to create a truly digital form of dance then slave in guitar abuse to make death defying bone crushers.
This is freak out music in the sense of forays into the universe and awe at the vastness of possibility. But there is no free love or abandon here, just submission and damage.
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