Holy Ship – Hail Haze
Genre: Shoegaze, Psychedelic Rock, Dream Pop
Similar artists: Primal Scream, Film School
It doesn’t matter if you’re Jimi Hendrix or Johnny Ramone. Regardless of your playing ability, true blue rock n’ roll has its limitations. And, regardless of its beauty and potential to reveal hidden, beautiful things to its listeners, all of the constraints of the four-on-the-floor grooves and pentatonic licks can get you feeling caged.
This is especially true for musicians. After all, the most ambitious of them are dreamers who believe in the potential of sound to create something entirely unique, revolutionary, and life-changing. Psychedelic music, particularly the one that embraces new technology, at its very best, shoots outside of the known borders of pop music.
Holy Ship’s Hail Haze is music made with the same giddy feeling of abandon as acid-house of the early 1990s. It’s rock music at its heart, but one that daringly embraces dance grooves and electronic elements. While this may not be quite the cutting-edge pathway of old, it still speaks to the musicians’ and fans’ desire to escape the constraints of typical, unsurprising pop music.
The Sleeplings – June
Genre: Psychedelic / Freak Folk, Folk rock
Similar artists: Jonathan Hultén, The Beatles, Bo Kaspers Orkester, Radiohead
There’s a prevailing theory that no story written by any serious author is truly original. Isn’t that enough to make you weep? If you believe, for example, in Joseph Campbell’s theory every hero’s story is a retelling of an older legend.
The facts seem to speak for themselves. There aren’t great artists that don’t have very strong influences. In fact, some would argue that what makes an artist’s work brilliant is their ability to take inspiration from just the right sources.
The truth is that the language of guitar-based songwriting has been fully formed for decades. It was there even when The Beatles started putting pen to paper. In fact, it’s one of the reasons why Lennon and McCartney were shocked, at first, to learn that someone could copyright songwriting.
The Sleeplings’ June does an incredible trick of taking lovely, folky, psychedelic elements and using them as colors to paint a picture that is wholly original. This may all sound like an impressive concept, but wait until you hear the record! It’s a wonderful, exploratory mix of Beatlesque melodies, Thom Yorke-like vocal lines, and a bit of Nordic magic. Every day someone rewrites the book.
