Psychic Ills
Dins

Listening to the second track of this debut album by the "Psychic Ills," one might easily doubt their geographical origin.

Although they are part of the New York scene, these five youngsters seem to have emerged from late '60s Texas, not before taking a boat ride on the Mekong with Dennis Hopper. On the aforementioned track, "Electric Life," they portray themselves as the new 'Red Crayola', complete with a free-form freakout style intro and outro, and in the middle a highly acidic cloud of reverberations.

Dedicated to the more hypnotic and suggestive side of psychedelia, which makes good use of few notes and simple riffs to achieve the desired effect, in 8 tracks and less than 40 minutes, they pay homage, while reworking, outdated musical influences and approaches, producing an album totally detached from today's music scene.
This feature can easily classify them as nostalgic, or worse, musical revisionists/revanchists; it's not my place to judge the motivations or artistic honesty behind such a choice, but when faced with episodes like "January Rain," I can't help but call them genius.

Rarely does a band on their first album reach such heights of syncretism and musical synthesis without providing too many explicit references to the sources. The sonic blend of "Dins" is often made of little: a tribal drum, an obsessive piano riff, a voice that mostly whispers, doesn't sing, and there you have it. As mentioned above, the only identifiable reference is the early Red Crayola, often more for the approach than for musical affinity tout court; for the rest, the concoction prepared by our musicians is homogenous and incredibly consistent.

"Inauration" and "I Knew My Name," which merge into one another, evoke both early Can and the Velvets sick with "White Light White Heat," "Another Day Another Night" flies over a carpet of lysergic guitars where the voice seems to come from distant and unknown lands, "Witchcraft Breaker" and "East" implode in a short time with reminiscences of Buddhist gongyō, assorted noise, and backward tapes.

As of today, psychedelic album of the year. "Guaranteed to blow your mind"