![]() Psychedelic Horseshit at times recall the early Pavement singles later collected on Westing (By Musket and Sextant)- snide charm and crappy sound figure heavily into the success of both. The chronologically arranged set gets less dunderheaded and more tuneful as it plays, and once you get around to the Summertime Suicide EP- with its appropriately sunny "Anxiety of Influence" and true shitgaze anthem "Nothing Is New"- you do start to see a band worth giving a damn about emerging, even if you're not having much fun in the discovery. Of the 20 tracks, you could count on one hand the number you'll remember even after a dozen listens. Oldies is not the best introduction to their work, but it is perhaps the finest microcosm of their charm. It's awfully long, lacks cohesion by design, and finds a skronky, idiot-savanty band at their loudest and dumbest. These aren't quite demos, but as songs, they're half-baked at best, half-formed at worst. But you could wait roughly forever for maybe 80% of the songs to all of a sudden appear out of the ether here confident as they are in their slack, stoney, surf-and-mod-tinged no wave, one gets the feeling some of that confidence lies in a belief that almost nobody is going to listen to this weird music beyond the dudes making it and a few passing burnouts.Ĭertainly that much seems true of Golden Oldies, which makes it tough to recommend. When so moved, they can juice the lo-fi production aesthetic into something far less brittle and caged-in than that qualifier often signifies, and Matt Whitehurst's misanthropy (anyone who's heard Magic Flowers Droned's "New Wave Hippies" in concert knows that whole Wavves-bashing incident was hardly isolated) does make for some amusing phrasings. Even at their most braying, there's something to Psychedelic Horseshit's songs. ![]() Placed in order, one can see something like progress in Psychedelic Horseshit's sound: Oldies is especially turgid and tune-averse, Magic Flowers adds a lot of dynamism to the thick-as-a-brick mix, and Anthems is a little longer and more carefully wrought (though even here, there's still plenty of 'tude and not a lot of what most folks consider hooks). So what's to be done with a band like Psychedelic Horseshit, who've got little interest in pop of any sort, who make their extraneous noise out of necessity rather than some aesthetic choice, and who, through their limited recording budgets and less than sophisticated songwriting prowess, are kind of not a lot of fun to listen to?Įn route to their forthcoming sophomore full-length Too Many Hits (this seems unlikely), Psychedelic Horseshit have dropped a few curios that explain this band's unique, er, appeal: Golden Oldies, a collection of CD-Rs and other small-batch material that predates their 2007 LP debut Magic Flowers Droned, and Shitgaze Anthems, a collection of would-be B-sides from the aforementioned Hits LP. Certainly that much is true for the best of them as for the recent avalanche of also-rans, the tightrope walk between craft and crunch tends to leave one wanting for more of both. ![]() Surely you've heard the party line on this newish crop of lo-fi revivalists: given enough time wading in the muck, you start to filter out the noise and the song remains.
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