FISH NIGHT – Splicetime!
The whole purpose of psychedelic music was to get you surprised, confused, and running for a door that you could never find. It promised that it would play with your mind, subvert expectations, turn you into the kind of creature that your mother wouldn’t be able to recognize. Psychedelic rock was supposed to be the kind of thing that you avoided if you’d managed to acquire a nice job in a bank and wanted to hold on to it.
But, alas, even before the dreadful AI disease, everything turned into a formula, an algorithm, a set of ingredients. I’ll whisper “psychedelic rock” in your ear, and you’ll immediately, and inevitably, start thinking of bands creating droney feedback music and dedicating all their lyrics to their supreme love of weed. However, fortunately, there are exceptions to this rule, bands who take their role as pervertors of musical forms seriously, and one of those, typically, hard to locate groups is FISH NIGHT.
Now, sadly, I wasn’t in the room when the decision was made. But I can assume that FISH NIGHT’s “Splicetime!” is music designed to stun and befuddle you. It’s the kind of song that, should you listen to it in your headphones while zooming on a roller coaster, you will never recover again. It’s aggressive, funny, and blends genres together as if trying to make a great big stew out of all the ingredients available in the pantry. Best of all, FISH NIGHT doesn’t give you any time to get comfortable with this approach, making whatever it is that the band does next all the more intriguing.
Blood Moon Commune – Hex
We live, generally, in hugely uninspiring times. And my theory is that a lot of this has to do with the fact that we simply know too much about the world to feel enticed to ask any good questions. While typing this out, I’ve just used my nose to bring up a live stream of the Brazilian jungle, and used my pinky to find out what breakfast my favourite has had this morning.
All of this information makes it pretty hard to care enough about modern rockstars and become a true fan. Back in the day, people used to wonder if Jimmy Page was a sorcerer, if Keith Richards’ liver was made out of steel, and if Paul McCartney was dead. There are few of these theories even worth concocting nowadays and that’s the reason why we need Blood Moon Commune.
Music, and to a lesser degree other art forms, are the greatest narcotic. That’s because they allow you to travel to anyone you want to go, rather than becoming a slave to a chemical. And, when you listen to Blood Moon Commune, a band that describes itself as a shadowy spiritual organization trying to enroll Britain’s youth, and the band’s single “Hex,” you are in the Brazilian jungle, listening to ritualistic songs, and trying to extract psychedelics out of a green frog’s left testicle. You don’t get that out of a stream, surely and, frankly, I can only hope we never learn who Blood Moon Commune is comprised of and whether it’s just a 15-year-old on a laptop in Bristol putting the whole thing together.
