Psych/Garage Rock charts

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: After years spent delivering heady fusions of deep funk and Afro-funk on Daptone Records, The Budos Band resurface on Diamond West, an imprint founded by two of the band's key members earlier this year. Their first missive on the California-based imprint is as rousing and fiery as ever, with their usual riotous and heavyweight sound being subtly expanded via nods towards psych-funk, Mariachi Band music and the funk-rock sound made famous by Sly and the Family Stone. The six scorching instrumentals on show are all superb, with our current favourites including the punchy 'The Devil Doesn't Care', the trippy solo-laden explosion that is 'KRITIN' and the deliciously psychedelic and suspenseful 'Curled Steel'.

Review: 'Folk funk and trippy troubadours' main man Paul Hillery - a dedicated crate digger and vinyl hunter whose musical knowledge is exceptional - scored a hit with his first compilation We Are The Children of The Sun. He's now curated a sequel, which once again explores a range of rare, thoroughly obscure sounds that he loosely terms 'folk funk' and 'Balearic AOR'. This is music for sunsets, sunrises and long drives through grandiose landscapes. The plentiful highlights include, but are in no way limited to, the synth-sporting cosmic AOR brilliance of Forest's 'Crazy Days', the jazz-folk brilliance of Wendy Grace's 'More Than Hope', Aria Rostami's acoustic ambient excellence ('Golden Hour') and a previously unheard cover of 'Milk & Honey' by musical polymath Greg Foat and his ever-changing backing band.

Review: Skep Wax's first Under The Bridge compilation, released in 2022, reunited the bands, songwriters and producers who populated cult early '90s indie label Sarah Records. This hotly anticipated follow-up repeats the trick, presenting 20 recently recorded cuts from the Bristol-based imprint's original roster of artists. It too, is a hugely successful - and understandably nostalgic - exercise, with hi9ghlights including the bright-and-breezy indie jangliness of Action Painting's 'Just Who Are The Cockleshell Heroes', the shoegaze-influenced dream pop haziness of Soundwire's 'Everything Is Real', the near Balearic soft focus shuffle of 'Double Nine' by GNAC, and the saucer-eyed excellence of The Orchids' 'A Final Love Song'.

Review: While Jim Jupp's work as the Belbury Poly has always touched on pagan imagery, clandestine atmospherics and vintage electronics - with a dash of pastoral instrumentation thrown in from time to time - it's fair to say that he's never released an album quite like The Path, his seventh full-length excursion. Recorded with the help of a band of musicians - bass, guitar, flute, clarinet and piano all feature alongside his familiar analogue and modular synth sounds - and a narrator (poet and spoken word artist Justin Hopper), the album manages to be atmospheric and alluring whilst also being loose and groovy - all re-imagined folk-rock, eyes-closed psychedelia, breezy jazz and library music chic. It will surprise some fans, for sure, but it's a genuinely fantastic album and a huge step forward from a producer who's not content to just plough the same musical furrow.

Review: It's something of an anomaly that Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats, a now long-serving band inspired late 1960s psychedelia, garage rock and proto-metal, have not previously released a live album - despite a reputation as one of the most incendiary live outfits around. Slaughter On First Avenue sets the record straight, offering a near complete recording of a live performance stretched across two discs. Hazy, mystical and delightfully hallucinatory, it genuinely offers a snapshot of Kevin Starrs' band at the peak of their powers - all effects-laden instrumentation, droning lead vocals, weighty early Black Sabbath style riffs, energetic drums and kaleidoscopic intent. An absolute must for fans of the band and the wider psych-rock sound.

Review: If you're in the mood for heavy, fuzz-drenched guitar riffs, psychedelic intent, bass-heavy grooves and gnarled, echo-laden vocals, Geordie outfit Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs has you covered. They're at their weighty, intense and intoxicating best of 'Land of Sleeper', their first studio album for three years. They set the tone with the exceptionally dense, atmospheric and intense 'Ultimate Hammer', which evokes the grand heavy rock/proto-metal of Black Sabbath, Judas Priest and Led Zepellin. The album continues in that vein, with a dash of punkish, late '70s/early '80s 'new wave of heavy metal' thrown in. A few critics have already suggested that it may end of being the best heavy rock album of 2023; while it's too early to tell, it's certainly a fantastic full-length excursion.

Review: Emerging from Germany's psychedelic and progressive rock underground in the late 1960s, Amon Duul was a freewheeling collective named in honour of the "art commune" in Berlin in which they not only came together, but also recorded their turn-of-the-seventies albums - most notably the 1972 double album Disaster Luud Noma. Here reissued in fully remastered form, the album is highly significant - and not just because it is now counted as one of the earliest expressions of what would become known as krautrock. Built on dense, layered percussion and rhythms beaten out by multiple drummers, its' hard-to-pigeonhole sound drew on fuzzy psychedelic rock, twisted jazz-rock and the collective's own radical experimentation. It remains an utterly insane record, but a brilliant one at that.

Review: NME's mail-order 'C86' compilation, released way back in 1986, has become something of a cherished time capsule: an acclaimed, on-point collection that summed up indie and alternative rock in the mid 1980s. This three-disc compilation is touted by Cherry Red as a "prequel" to that legendary comp. It naturally features some of the same artists - usually in the form of earlier tracks or obscurities - as well as the rest of the cream of the crop of indie in 1985. There are pre-fame recordings from James, the Stone Roses and Primal Scream, jangly guitars aplenty, and killer cuts from bands that briefly flickered brightly but time has generally forgotten.

Review: Family's final studio album, It's Only a Movie, celebrated its 50th birthday in late 2023. To mark the occasion, Esoteric has offered up this remastered, expanded edition. Disc one boats the original album, an extended fusion of blues, psychedelic rock, string-laden progressive rock and Country & Western-influenced Americana, as well as a handful of single B-sides, alternate takes and early versions of LP cuts. Over on disc two, we're treated to a mixture of BBC 'in concert' recordings (where their roots in the British blues explosion of the late 1960s are far more evident) and performances captured for BBC Radio One's legendary 'Top Gear' programme (which did much in the 1960s to bring Beatles performances to the masses).

Review: Khruangbin has very much become the masters of the downtempo sphere over the last decade. The Texan Thai-funk trio makes spaced-out, star-gazing and gently psychedelic sounds with deep and dubby rhythms, barely-there but alluring vocal hooks and persuasive basslines. Mordechai was their third studio album back in June of 2020 and is an ode to everything that'd done to date. Building on their Thai and Iranian rock roots, they head into new ground with a subtle lyrical freshness and more widescreen world of intercontinental influences all perfectly fused into their own sublime sounds.