My Expansive Awareness
Going Nowhere

Directly from Zaragoza, Spain, here are My Expansive Awareness with José Briceno (vocals and guitar), Lucia Escudero (vocals and percussion), Juan Gracia (drums), Diego Lis (synth and Farfisa), and Jota Garcia (bass).

'Going Nowhere' is their latest LP and was recorded between June and July 2016 at the Laboratorio Audiovisual in Zaragoza by Carlos Estella and Jose Manuel Huerta.

Released on Analog Love Records last February 13th, 'Going Nowhere' is a good offer of neo-psychedelic music. Its flaw, rather than lacking originality, which sometimes happens, might be in the quality of the recordings that is not always stellar, and in some compositional phases that I find too disconnected from each other, which instead of suggesting neo-psychedelia, rather remind me of certain episodes of 1980s wave music that I believe made sense historically only in that specific period.

The saving grace is that every time the band's sound is about to go off the rails, these guys somehow always manage to get back on track and eventually arrive at the final destination in a more than convincing manner.

The album opens with 'Going Nowhere', the title track, which immediately showcases the band's most typical characteristics: the commanding bass sound; the use of vintage synths and organs; the two reverberated voices (male and female) that overlap here and there, increasing that hollow effect which is so characteristic when sometimes not very convincing; convincing guitar riffs in the style of the Warlocks; a nod to the 'catchy' pop psychedelia of the Dandy Warhols and a certain Californian tradition.

Songs like 'Life', the surf-psychedelia of 'Talking', the nihilistic 'We All Die', and the concluding 'My Expansive Awareness', characterized by certain Blue Angel Lounge-like tones and arrangements worthy of the early Brian Jonestown Massacre, the beautiful instrumental track 'Bamboo Jr.' (again Warlocks) are all songs that, in my opinion, are worthy of a good neo-psychedelic music album.

But there are some missteps that become difficult to place in the context of the overall work.

'Heaven' for example, where only the dominant bass line stands out against completely evanescent sounds. 'The Wheel' with a certain use of very 1980s guitars and references to a certain revival of wave music like Franz Ferdinand, a Noel Gallagher-esque guitar solo. 'Never Got What You Wanted' which attempts to use the Farfisa sound in a classic 1960s psychedelic manner, evoking oriental atmospheres, but instead gets lost in a great void, resembling an episode of 1980s experimental garage wave.

All of this makes it practically impossible to give a completely positive judgment on this work.

We are facing a good band, which may never have pivotal ideas that will make it take flight, but which in my opinion, if it remained more grounded, would have the chance to make much better and more convincing records than this one.

Some solutions, moreover, like the constant use of reverberated dual male and female vocals, in my opinion, are interesting and deserve to be exploited in a context where one can cling to greater certainties. Whereas here sometimes all support is lacking and even these positive things end up falling into an abyss where the sun does not shine.

Special mention for the cover: beautiful, it picks up a certain Karel Thole style mixed with obvious Dalí influences. But how could it be otherwise? After all, we are in Spain and it is true that Salvador Dalí came from Figueres in Catalonia, but Catalonia, in the end, is a region of Spain just like Aragon. Or not.