Features

Psych Survey: Ethan Miller, Comets on Fire/Howlin Rain

Comets on Fire

ETHAN MILLER, Comets on Fire, Howlin’ Rain

5 Post-Punk Psych Albums
1. Butthole Surfers, Rembrandt Pussy Horse, Cream Corn, Psychic Powerless, Locust Abortion Technician (early albums)
The Butthole Surfers really took back up the wand that The Doors and the Velvet Underground put down in the Summer of Love-era and that was “psychedelic music” in shades of black. An infinite cosmos of chaos and violence, nihilism in mythical proportions recklessly swung like a sword by a grinning, blindfolded vitriolic drunk on acid. Bad Trip.
2. Melvins, Lysol (or really any Melvins album through 1991)
A real masterpiece in any genre. Here the Melvins took some pages from the krautrock masters like Can, Faust and Ash Ra Temple and experimented in distances of time and space and achieving heaviosity via abstracts blended with their own truly visionary sound. An overwhelmingly malevolent spirit to this psychedelic masterpiece—infinitely dark and beautiful.
3. Jesus and Mary Chain, Psycho Candy
The name of the album really correctly sums up anything I would say to describe it.
4. Mainliner, Mellow Out
Mainliner and Nanjo’s other groups High Rise, Musica Transonica, etc. kind of took the last tracers of the Summer of Love-era psychedelic vision to its logical end. Extended explosive rock jams with vicious freakout guitar solos that were recorded so far in the red that it sounds like your speakers have been slashed and lit on fire. No shit. That over-compressed “In The Red” sound is a more common technique in rock recordings now but when Mellow Out was released it was singular in its power and an epiphany in the way that heavy rock music could sound.
5. Scientist, Rids the World of the Curse of the Evil Vampires
No music seemed to carry on the tradition of “sonic experience” (as blue printed by Sgt. Pepper’s and Pet Sounds) like the great dub records of the ‘70s and ‘80s. The Scientist albums of the ‘80s are some of my favorites and are some of the strangest and most beautiful and extreme sonic trippery out there: Scientist Meets the Space Invaders, Scientist Wins the World Cup, etc.
Lost Classics
Lazy Smoke
Link Wray (s/t from 1971 on Fontana label)
Frumious Bandersnatch
T2
SRC
Les Rallizes Denudes Oz Days EP
Catherine Ribeiro albums
Jesse Harper
Bill Fay
Fleetwood Mac, Live at the Boston Tea Party
The Groundhogs, Thank Christ For the Bomb
Relatively Clean Rivers