The Imajinary Friends
Lunchtime In Infinity

THE REVIEW

It's the summer of 1993 when Travis Threlkel (The Brian Jonestown Massacre, Tipsy), Ricky Maymi (The Brian Jonestown Massacre), and Graham Bonnar (Swervedriver), soon joined by Matt Hollywood (The Brian Jonestown Massacre) and Tim Digulla (Tipsy), lay the foundations for the project The Imajinary Friends. Legend has it that the legendary Grag Shaw decided he would produce and release their record for BOMP! without listening to even a note and without the band ever having played live: he didn't need to, he was convinced the record would be a real bomb, and he was not wrong. "Lunchtime In Infinity" is released after a few months, in June 1994, practically twenty-five years after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot on the Moon, and indeed the record still appears today as an alien object, something that transcends every boundary marked by psychedelic music and space rock up to that moment and over the years has become a true cult object and the symbol of a historical phase for the psych scene of San Francisco. Also because, caught up in various projects, after the release of a split in 1999 with Peter "Sonic Boom" Kember’s band Spectrum, the group did not return to the studio for over fifteen years, somehow fueling the myth of this first LP.

"New Fast Car" is a garage rock and roll track with obsessive rhythms, dominated by the enveloping sound of the bass (played by Matt Hollywood) and the fuzz of electric guitars that wander into abstract noise compositions ("Hideous But Helpless") laden with electro-static energy. "Faked Out," built on a minimal arpeggio, and the garage-style sound of "Silence Is Golden Applesauce" introduce altered atmospheres in the style of Public Image Limited, while the distorted voice reprises the typical recital of bands like Bauhaus. The second part of the record is instead pure avant-garde. "Lushus/Fanta Grape" is an expressionist no-wave manifesto, "Frog In Her Throat/Alien Drugstore" revisits concepts directly from the most advanced psychedelic avant-garde of the sixties and seventies with sounds imbued with suggestions typical of Tibetan music and phantom echoes and reverb. "Love Your Stereo Typewriter" is pure wild kraut-rock until the final noise explosion in which the tape rewinds and plays a Velvet Underground record backward, conjuring altered visions of Hunter Thompson, the most acid landscapes of Suicide, a hallucination coming directly from the screen of a Cronenberg film that, however, is concrete and dense as reality.