Father Murphy
..And He Told Us To Turn To The Sun

THE REVIEW

If psychedelia is a journey towards the sun, then Father Murphy has circumnavigated it to reach other universes, a journey beyond infinity as in "2001: A Space Odyssey," at the end of which, however, lies a dark, morbid world with impossible perspectives, disturbing and indefinable.

Their music has something sacred, metaphysical, yet the vocal choruses that repeat the same melody like a mantra are always broken, deviated, lost in a disjointed and disorganized flow, a non-logical structure. The nine episodes included in the album are actually a sort of magmatic whole of angular, dissonant, disturbing psychedelia that refuses to be framed in any attempt. Father Murphy are singers of something that is ending; their music reeks of disease, it is cathartic, in the sense that from music like this one can only be reborn into new life; thus, it's music very much of this time, a time when nothing seems able to look to the future. It's music without a center of gravity, about and of madness.

Father Murphy is thus one of the most original psychedelic groups around, there is no slightest hint of them being akin to anything from the past. The references are obviously there, but their threadbare and a-melodic music shreds any possible resemblance. Perhaps the group they are closest to is their fellow countrymen, Jennifer Gentle, for the grotesque modus operandi with which they design their impossible worlds... but in their case, the music is distinctly more unsettling, delving deeper into restless unconscious archetypes, reducing any form discourse to a minimum.