Psychedelic Horseshit
Magic Flowers Droned

Those among you who are my more or less faithful regular readers (seriously, don’t you have anything better to do, you losers?!), will remember how in the review of Times New Viking we had already introduced the term Shitgaze, a new and dubious musical current that, summarizing briefly for the most distracted or those who might have missed (alas) my previous gem, makes a virtue out of necessity, transforming its members' musical nerdiness and instrumental illiteracy into their main point of strength and recognition.

Psychedelic Horseshit are somewhat the putative fathers of this movement and their first CD is assumed to be somewhat of an archetype of all shitgaze works; apparently, they were indeed the first to ironically coin the term used to describe their music, in honor of their inspirators My Bloody Valentine; obviously, the critics seized the opportunity, coining from this word an entire new musical genre, knowing the audience is always eager for novelties and the umpteenth "big next thing".

This has led some of the listeners to have an excessively romantic vision of these new groups (as, after all, was the case with punk), seeing the "homemade" recordings and the generally very "spartan" approach as a real "philosophical-ideological" stance, a kind of intentional primitivism, a naive or minimalist approach to music, a hymn to independence from the majors and contempt for the mainstream; others label it all as crap, played by unskilled people (and again, the references to punk are abundant).

Well, much healthier, relaxed, and commendable is the approach the trio itself has towards themselves and their music, which is that of not taking themselves too seriously and seeing themselves above all as a group of friends playing rock, having fun, and making others have fun. If their self-coined epithet to define themselves (both as a group and as a genre) weren’t enough, a statement during an interview is also emblematic regarding the group's attitude: quoting more or less from memory, it was stated "people notice that often at our concerts the pieces change, sometimes significantly, every time we play them, thinking maybe that we are mega-virtuosos who like to improvise, when in truth we simply suck too much to play our own songs well".

Thus, their first creation, "Magic Flowers Droned", represents somewhat the infamous object of scandal, which set the whole bandwagon in motion, of groups and works obviously (as in any genre) largely dispensable, but also capable of bringing out some interesting names.
The work in question rightfully falls into the second category, with its "poor man's psychedelia", strictly lo-fi; but in this case, the noise patina does not primarily serve to cover musical deficiencies; it simply serves to recreate the right decadent atmosphere that fully immerses us in the rot of the tracks, which indeed show (as in the best cases of this genre) various cultured influences, ranging from shoegaze, to kraut, to noise.

So in the end, are these Psychedelic Horseshit serious or are they just pretending? Probably a bit of both, but that doesn't take away from the fact that this effort of theirs is damn catchy and adorable in its reckless irreverence, so I certainly won't be the one to deny it a solid 3 balls.