The tireless psych rocker’s latest is simultaneously sleek and sludgy. It’s not quite his cleanest-sounding album, nor his heaviest, but it stands close to the top of both categories.
In treading through the annals of rock music, it’s hard to argue that any approach to the genre has been more persistent than psychedelic-rock. From the jangling opening riff of 13th Floor Elevators’ “You’re Gonna Miss Me,” to the outpouring of groups that flocked to Haight-Ashbury in the late- 60s (therein forging a widespread counterculture), to the shoegaze sounds that swept the U.K. throughout the 90s, rock artists have continuously found new ways to interpret the ever-malleable, wide-ranging sound of psychedelic music.
Aside from modern pop’s incorporation ( cough appropriation) of the genre’s aesthetic, the national craze around this music and its culture is clearly not as prevalent as it once was, when thousands of young Americans blew off their middle-class expectations for the Learyology of “dropping out and tuning in.” Since the start of the decade, however, a more subtle independent scene has been brewing thanks to forward-thinking artists like The Bl