
Beyond Abbey – Sword Of Queens
A lot of the greatest rock n’ roll is born out of great, courageous endeavours. Some of your best records had at the heart of them the madness of musicians who ignored the risks of making fools of themselves or bankrupting their record labels. A lot of the very best albums have a storyline and a heady concept that gives the songs greater weight and meaning.
Now, that part is all true. You can just pick one of those records up and listen to them for proof. But the story is so good that it’s been co-opted by PR companies doing their best to legitimize the activity of their rich clients or, most often, just to make them appear interesting. What can you say about someone who has all the money in the world yet spends all their time posting juvenile, unfunny sex jokes? That they desperately need good PR to make them appear human and incredibly good PR to make them appear interesting.
Beyond Abbey takes a great leap of faith into concept-album territory. Should the band succeed, all the glory will belong to the band members, and their deeds will be easily accessible. It’s more than you can say about billionaires stripping German forests off the face of the Earth in order to produce substandard electric vehicles.
The theatrical psychedelic rock that Beyond Abbey works with is certainly impressive. But it’s the concept that captures our imagination. This is part of a suite of tunes describing a penal colony set out on Mars in the 23rd Century by Elon Musk. Such association only makes Mr. Musk appear cooler than he really is, but make no mistake, Beyond Abbey’s musicians are the true mavericks here.
Lilia May – Someone else’s garden
The worst thing that pop-rock music can do is to be boring. And, with so many rules that it must follow, this is exactly what most pop songs end up doing. There are only so many times that the same format can be used and still sound fresh and exciting.
Like sci-fi writers who are not pressured by reality to write their fantastic stories, psychedelic-rock music doesn’t need to obey the rules that radio pop sets for everyone else. There is no limit to the length of the song, the kind of instrumentation used, or the richness of the lyrics.
Psychedelic music is an excuse for songwriters to let their imagination run wildly, something that ought to be a requirement across the music world but isn’t. Not everyone can deal with this kind of freedom, but Lilia May makes the best of it as the artist pushes compositions to their limit.
Lilia May’s “Someone Else’s Garden” is a song of questions, not of answers, and many of them are pointed straight at the audience. There’s not a great deal of information on who has stuck in the metaphoric harden, why they’ve planted a tree there and what that tree will grow. But the rich psych-rock instrumental and May’s nearly shamanic chanting will do their own planting as they place images in your mind. In pop music nowadays, psychedelia is one of the last refuges of the real dreamers.