Psycho-Contempo: The Grasping Straws and Mr. Tyler Larson reviewed

Mr. Tyler Larson – Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairy

True psychedelic music is lost in a haze of feedback and poor weed. For the most part, psych-rock has been reduced to 2nd rate Black Sabbath groups holding sermons about flying wizards and true forces of evil. 

Now, luckily, there’s something perverted and crack-pot about Mr Tyler Larson. Those are qualities that informed the original wave of psychedelic music, and likely traits that took many of the style’s pioneers to a quick visit around the madhouse. 

Larson reworks Tchaikovsky’s Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairy, but not so much in hopes of performing a cover, but rather like a piece of found music that he chooses to stretch out like a rubber band. It’s a nifty, crazy exercise. Would this work with any piece of classical music? Perhaps “Sweet Child O’ Mine” is due an update sometime soon. 

The Grasping Straws – Help

A long time ago, Bjork proclaimed that the age of the electric guitar had come and gone. This sent many an alternative-rock fan into mourning and sent John Frusciante scrambling to rearrange his pedal-board in search of less conservative tones. 

The Grasping Straws have clearly paid little mind to those dirty rumours. Their single Help features plenty of trad rock instrumentation, but also the inventiveness, quirkiness, and frantic,  disorientation techniques best observed on some of Bjork’s own early records. 

Yes, the band sounds like they really want to play punk, and the singer seems as if she really enjoys psychedelic music. But, the way it’s all put together is exciting and inventive, the best that you can ask for in a rock tune. There’s even a video collab with an experimental artist that further drives the art-rock point home.