Max Mercier – Dance In Your Fire
In terms of soulful comfort, naturally, music works differently on people. Personally, I don’t think there’s any other style that hugs you closer in its warm embrace than modern psychedelic music.
For all the pleasure they provide, those aren’t natural sounds though. It’s a style more akin to a hybrid animal, produced rather than created by the natural world. It works because somebody, in this case, Mr Max Mercier, puts in the tireless hours to write and arrange a constellation of sounds in just the right order for them to make sense.
Dance In Your Fire is a slow, soulful, psych-rock tune that could not be produced without the aid of modern technology and without a whole lot of elbow grease. It’s written from the perspective for someone whose love interest has vanished. The memories of those times come flooding back over an electronic groove, using sleek, reverb-soaked vocals.
Knopf – At Least We’ve Got Rice
The one-man psych-rock army known as Knopf is anything if not ambitious. The mysterious titled At Least We’ve Got Rice, I am told, is just one fuzzy-rock slice of an entire concept album centred around the mythology of California.
Knopf’s music, as is the case on this single, is centred around the values of psych-rock. Unlike many of his contemporaries, however, his preferred method of sonic transcendence involves guitar, drums and a colour palette that was most popular around the end of the 1960s.
Wah-wah guitar sounds melt like butter under the hot Californian sound. Vocal melodies are punctuated by clean harmonies. Solos sparkle like someone setting off fireworks in the desert at midnight.
It sounds like cult music. Not in the sense that it has a few loyal fans scattered across the world, but rather the kind where people are required to all dress in white, chant together and plot the details for a new civilization.