The duo of Psychedelic Horseshit (Matt Whitehurst and Ryan Jewell) from Columbus, Ohio made a splash, or at least a squelchy noise, with their lo-fi debut album Magic Flowers Drowned on Siltbreeze.
That record included scurrilous downer anthems like New Age Hippies ("an entire generation with no-one to believe") and Bad Vibrations with more than a hint of the disdainful anti-fashion vocal style of Mark E. Smith.
They also accidentally invented the genre of Shitgaze - a jokey corruption of Shoegaze that someone decided to run with and which got to be added as a favoured tag for the abrasive punk-rock aesthetic of artists like Blank Dogs, Eat Skull or No Age.
As with The Fall, their lo-fi absence of finesse was worn as a badge of honour and this continues with their second full length album. They claim that it was recorded in random locations from basements to bathrooms without amplifiers and on basic reel to reel equipment.
It is called Laced partly because it weaves together influences from different periods. Matt H says that "the album has a vague concept about dreams and the hollowness of words" and it could easily serve as a soundtrack to the day in the life of a slacker struggling for a reason to leave the couch.
The sampled snippet of B-movie dialogue - "what's so wonderful about reality?" - at the start of Revolution Waters sums up the who gives a fuck anyway attitude.
The first three tracks, Puff / Time Of Day / French Countryside - contain synthesised squawks, fragmented vocals and random riffs described succinctly by a Fat Cat scriptwriter as a "blissed-out frequency mess".
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The title track has them thinking about trying to establish some semblance of shape to these scratchy beats and this leads to the stoner-dub of Tropical Vision and the defiant lines : "I don't have to prove that I am always thinking, I'd rather be quite stupid in my tropical vision".
Now half awake, they summon the energy for a seven and half minute epic, and album centrepiece, I Hate The Beach, which contains the caveat "but I like the nice weather". The swirling psychedelics of this track are the sonic equivalent of zooming in on a digital pixel image to the point that it becomes just a fuzzy haze.
On the remaining tracks, Dead On Arrival is a bored state of mind set to music featuring a guest vocal appearance from Times New Viking's Beth Murphy; Automatic Writing is a curious ambient filler while Another Side (Dylanesque harmonica anybody?) and Making Out are more of old school post-punk of their debut.
All in all this patchy , but hugely entertaining, outsider pop is not so much a progression, more like viewing the same shit from a slightly different angle.
Psychedelic Horseshit on Myspace
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