If the band name doesn’t give enough by way of a clue, the track titles (‘Fly Away’; ‘Outer Spaced’; ‘The Light’ to pick three) give a fair indication of what this album is about. The band are called Hashish, and I guess you might call them a stoner rock band. Not that they exactly rock. They’re way too chilled for that, man. What they’d call themselves, I’m not sure.
The press release says they’re ‘inspired by the kaleidoscopic sounds of the 60s and 70s, Hashish have combined retro bass lines and kraut drums with an overall electronic lounge vibe, to create a record that is genre crossing, experimental and modern.’ But listening to the album, it seems the title ‘A Product of Hashish’ covers things under the Trade Descriptions Act, and it can’t only be vintage music that’s inspired the seven tracks here.
The trickling ambience swells of the intro track ‘Bliss’ may lull the listener into the expectation that this is a chillout album, but the rumbling crash of waves and a slow-swirling vortex of mellow synth tones prefaces a trippy bass groove and shuffling drums for the eight-minute ‘Fly Away’. Actually, it reminds me of ‘Then’ by The Charlatans without the guitars. Or the chorus. Instead, it meanders and noodles through an epic solo on clarinet or somesuch similar woodwind. The female vocals glide in on a comet
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The grooves sure are mellow, locking into some metronomic beats over which old-school analogue synths go widescreen and spacey and robotix vocals clang around in a zero-gravity setting. It’s retro-futurism amped up to the noodlesome, doodlesome max. From the bubbling drone of ‘Revel’ to the closing wibbles of ‘The Light 2’, it’s a triptastic kaleidoscope of psychedelic synth-based krautronica.
It should be a lot more fun than it is. But if you’re not participating or partaking, other people’s trips tend to be a drag, and this is just too self-absorbed to be engaging, and I find myself left on the outside looking on wondering how long before I can reasonably excuse myself from the party.
Hashish at Woah Dad!
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