Back catalogue: Psych/Garage Rock

Review: Ghost Funk Orchestra are a mystery. Plain and simple. Dirty, soulful production, verbed and fuzzed out guitars, mysterious vocals that feel like a lost score to a Quentin Tarantino film. Here Karma Chief do thorough justice to this elusive troupe's efforts, bringing together two excellent psych-funk encounters, 'Walk Like A Motherfucker' and 'Isaac Hayes'. The A is an incredible take on, well, "ghost funk", evoking a kind of Creedence-via-Khruangbin wash, in which we can only vaguely register the lyrics as a kind of subliminal, unconscious message (they really are that drowned in echo). The B is even more dreamlike, blurring various boundaries between hallmarks of 60s exploitation film music, modern dream pop and what can only be described as math funk.

Review: Seth Applebaum's NTC outfit Ghost Walk Orchestra originally released 'Brownout' on the Night Walker tape in 2016, distilling their hazy, psych-leaning funk sound into a perfect two-minute groove that shows off the band at their best. Now Karma Chief have pulled the track out of cassette obscurity and given it a pressing as a 7", backed up by 'Boneyard Baile' released the same year as a digi-only drop. If you love a moody funk jam played with finesse by a crack team, this record is a must.

Review: Geese tend not to be many twitchers' favourite taxonomic family of bird, but when it comes to music, many of the best artists pay homage. Goose, for example - the Connecticut indie folkers with a penchant for jammy freakouts - have unveiled the Undecided EP, a four-track studio collection of live favorites. The album tends towards the instrumental side of things, with climaxes emerging out of minimal slow jams, culminating in great brown washes of guitar and sumptuous, melodious crooning. Or honking, if you will; emotive and cathartic stuff.

Review: Grupo 606 really brought the fire in 1969 with this one. The Cochabamba, Bolivia collective only formed two years before they dropped a full EP and now two of the best tunes from it have been pressed up to 7" thanks to Discos Quilombo. It is an archetypal example of the so-called Nueva Onda Boliviana sound that starts off with a killer cover of the Blues Magoos' 'Gotta Get Away' which translates from 'Busco Un Camino' and is a swinging 60s psyche sound with Latin percussion and lovely vocal harmonies, then comes the self-penned flipside 'No, no puede ser' a beat driven gem with a taquirari influence.

Review: Belgian-Moroccan singer Aicha Haskal is at the heart of this fabulous project which sees her joining creative forces with super-talented musicians from the Belgian scene. Between them, the group has a mad diverse spread of backgrounds and influences which means their music too is broad in scope - psychedelic sounds and funky grooves, Arabic melodies and European rhythms all feature in this album as do rap and parlando. Egyptian poet Abdelhamid Farag penned their first single 'Ghalat' and now this album expands around that with music that fights the oppression of women and fights for revolution.

Review: While The Galileo 7's records are all nostalgic by design - they specialise in making psych-pop and psych-rock that sounds so authentically 1960s that it should come with a Beatle wig and a free tab of acid - few are quite as heady, densely layered or hallucinatory as 2017's Tear Your Minds Wide Open. Here that album is given the expanded reissue treatment. Alongside all 12 tracks from the set - including the squally brilliance of 'The Mask', with its gnarled guitar riffs, Hammond stabs and elongated solos, and the Hendrix-esque 'Your Face Tomorrow' - you get eight bonus cuts. Expect a mix of instrumental mixes, alternate versions, band demos and home recordings.

Review: Medway's garage rock king Allan Crockford has credits flittering all the way back to the 80's including the likes of The Prisoners, Billy Childish's Thee Headcoats, The Solarflares, and even the OG line-up of the James Taylor Quartet, to name but a handful. Keeping sharp and busy, however, The Galileo 7 serves as his own passion project; melding 60s mod-beat garage rock with jangling psychedelic pop, leading to a sonic bickering between anthemic hooks and fuzzed out, twinkling guitar lines. Following two exceptional full-lengths released through Damaged Goods; 2017's Tear Your Minds Wide Open! and 2019's There Is Only Now, the collective return after a half-decade of respite to deliver another batch of lysergic, hazy power pop goodness, intended for the wannabe mod/hippie in all of us.

Review: Ghost are sadly an easily confused band - doubly so, for the fact that there is now a wildly popular masked metal troupe of the same name, *and* because there is, uncannily, a 1984 film named Ghost, also rather well known. This confounding is apparently so prevalent that the obligatory Wikipedia entry on *this* Ghost is titled
'Ghost (1984 band)'. We wouldn't usually mention it, save for the fact that this perhaps not so wilful obscurantism actually works in their favour. With Drag City's reissue of Ghost's first album on griseous vinyl here, it's safe to say that this Japanese experimental psych/acid record's aura as a hidden gem feels rare to come by. It's almost as if Ghost (1984) is 'haunting' the other aforementioned cultural touchstones of the same name. Don't get it twisted, though: Ghost formed in the early 80s, but this debut recording didn't make it to the pressing plant until 1990. What explains the gap in their CV, you ask? Legend has it that the band led a truly nomadic existence - as a "band" should, in all senses of the word - roving, drifting from ruined ancient temples to disused subway stations near Tokyo. With that all checked, the album itself is truly free-spirited and eerie, and not what you'd expect from contemporary notions of space rock, with prepared tinkerings and strange readymade detritus seeming to fill each piece at every twist and turn.

Review: Building on the success of their A New Kind of Love album back in 2022, Ghost Funk Orchestra ventures further into the realms of film music, exotica, and psychedelic surf rock with new record A Trip To The Moon.' It was written with the aim of creating a richly layered and collaged listening experience with myriad elements waiting to be discovered with each new spin, and they have certainly achieved that. Featuring fuzzy guitars drenched in spring reverb and horns arranged in a studio big band style, it offers a blend of garage rock attitude and big compositions with influences like Eddie Palmieri and Dusty Springfield to be found within. It also features real recorded transmissions from the Apollo moon missions weaved throughout the tracks as a tale is told of a woman left stranded on Earth by her cosmonaut partner.

Review: Erlend Viken's first outing as Giant Sky - 2021's self-titled debut - was part epic prog rock overture and part major statement about the state of the music business. Only available in physical album format, for some time just a single track was doing the rounds on streaming services, which wasn't really a track at all, but instead a message about the evils of major streaming platforms and their role in ruining the artistic economy. Second time around, and the music itself is no less powerful. Moving from 'Origin Of The Species' and its floating-through-the-cosmos atmosphere, to the rousing call-to-unity of 'The Pensieve' and the industrial-noise-cum-delicate pop on 'Imposter', the vision and scope are incredible, new ideas seemingly presenting themselves at every twist and turn on this 13-strong track list.

Review: Russia's Gnoomes (aka Sasha Painkov and his wife Masha Piankova) have really overcome some hefty odds to get out their new album Ax Ox - the pandemic, illness, depression and of course turmoil back home. But it was worth the graft as they offer up a potent and moving mix of melancholia and strident optimism. The mix up the hope of dream pop with the drive of Krautrock, the vidid melodies of transcendent music with plenty of great narratives about the troubled relationship the band has with their home country. This is an eye-opening and thought-provoking record that is very much reflective of the troubled global times in which we love.

Review: Goat's World Music offers a captivating blend of Aboriginal, Nordic, psychedelia, acid Rock and tribal influences, exuding strong rock overtones driven by powerful female vocals that command attention with their intensity and strength. Throughout the album, listeners are treated to mesmerizing organ leads that add an ethereal dimension to the music, while abrasive and rash guitar work injects a raw energy into the sound. Tribal percussion rhythms further enhance the album's immersive atmosphere, transporting listeners on a sonic journey. With its diverse range of influences and eclectic instrumentation, World Music defies traditional genre boundaries, making this a listening experience that stands out.

Review: Goat were putting the finishing touches to their sixth album, Medicine, when they were approached to record a Levitation session. The filmed content is aimed at showing a band in a natural setting which gives them the freedom to take flight, musically speaking at least. Goat capitalised on this idea and their cohesion in the midst of recording sessions to capture a freewheeling workout in the remote church the band call home in the depths of northern Sweden. It's a sprawling psych rock fest as you'd rightly expect, with the band cutting loose in their natural habitat and bringing all kinds of wild electronic experimentation into the mix. This limited copper pressing of the sessions are the perfect document of a band at the peak of their powers.

Review: The mysterious Gothenburg based collective have apparently styled this as their 'folk' album yet this is less than half the story - indeed, 'Requiem' stands as an adventurous travail through styles and headspaces, moving from the vibrant psychedelic jams of their earlier work to ritualistic acoustic interludes, and with hi-life wave-ups rubbing shoulders with grage rock grit. Their ceremonial splendour is only enhanced by this all-encompassing outlook, with the more understated moments effortlessly hitting the same revelatory dimensions as the third-eye-cleansing moments of drama. And any band who can manage to make the panpipes sound thrilling and vibrant as an ingredient in their mystical brew would appear to have strange magick indeed on their side.

Review: Swedish psychedelic rock band Goat are currently in the middle of a worldwide tour, in recent months introducing their masked, anonymous live shows to festival punters. These shows take on an ensemble, ritual atmosphere, much to the bemused chagrin of consumer audiences, and their recorded albums are no less indicative of their related themes: spirituality, nature, play, death. Recorded across many different locations including Sweden, Brazil, India and Japan, Medicine is their latest opus, whereupon they channel a well-structured form of 70s-style prog to play up the cyclical nature of identity, a fact of life which is lost on most people. To quote the band - for our families, friends, society, this could be done through the use of psychedelics, through meditation, through learning from other people, staying curious and never settling for a 'solid' identity.

Review: The ninth studio album by the Grateful Dead, Terrapin Station came after a two-year hiatus by the band, who afterward returned to live touring and high-concept jazz-rocking. Something of an achievement in defining the more mathematic elements of prog at the time, several of the songs heard across the album deal in time signatures less common to the Westernized ear, with perhaps the most enduring of them all, 'Estimated Prophet', having been recorded in septuple time. Perhaps mirroring this sense of rhythmic ambition verging on megalomaniac grandeur, the album, seemingly springing forth from this central song, deals throughout with themes of false-prophetic grandiosity - cultic self-aggrandisement - that seemed to emanate from California and the West Coast at the time, especially in the immediate aftermath of the counterculture and in the more musical annals of history in the then-unfurling latter half of the 20th Century.

Review: Terrapin Station is the ninth studio album by Grateful Dead, and it captures the band as they moved into a new era following a two year hiatus from touring. It's notable they were paired by their new label Arista to work with producer Keith Olsen, who brought a cleaner finish to the band in a move away from their rawer psychedelic origins. The recording process was focused on a more palatable end result than the wild frontiers of their early days, but that didn't stop them from laying down sprawling, proggy epics like the 16-minute long title track. Originally released in 1977, it's landmark release in the band's mountainous back catalogue, repressed here on translucent green vinyl.