Tag: Psychedelic Rock

Local Band Feel: Kali Ma and the Garland of Arms – s/t

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Local Band Feel is a column dedicated to shining a light on music that’s happening around the corner, down the block, or a few towns over in our particular corner of the Pennsylvania wilds.  We encourage you to support the bands featured, should you feel so inclined.

 Jamie Kali lives one city over from me.  Wilkes Barre is the Shelbyville to Scranton’s Springfield.  If you live in there, your perspective is probably vice versa (at least I hope that it would be).  That seems like that’s the way that it’s always been, and probably will be forevermore.  Putting all of my sister city biases aside, Ms. Kali along with her compatriots have crafted something pretty interesting with their latest release; a self-titled, and self-released effort credited to, Kali Ma and the Garland of Arms.  What’s offered here is a bakers dozen of dreamy neo-psychedelic tunes that seem to take more cues from Grace Slick’s early Airplane flights than Lennon/McCartney for once, which is a nice change of pace.  We recommend you crack a Steg and settle in for a long strange trip down the electric mindshaft for this one.

Tim Presley’s White Fence – I Have To Feed Larry’s Hawk (Drag City)

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I Have To Feed Larry’s Hawk is the latest from neo-psychedelic wunderkind, and occasional Ty Segall collaborator, Tim Presley.  It’s a cryptic, and delicate song cycle that began it’s life in the rural United Kingdom town of Staveley, before being committed to tape in San Francisco, where it used to be a good move to be sure to wear flowers in your hair.  A fact that I don’t think was lost on its creator, as the city’s past psychedelic vibes seem to have gotten under Presley’s skin on the resulting LP.  While the finished product bears the audio and aural markings of both locations, it also remains content to float in its own peculiar pharmacological bubble outside of time and space.

The album feels like one of hazy rebirth.  You get the Barrettesque sea legs of the title track, and the Beefheartian shuffle of “Until You Walk”, along with the ode to the mysterious locale of “Fog City,” presented to us in two versions that only help to add a generous helping of disorientation.  The album’s primary 12-song cycle is built on this theme along with two additional instrumental pieces of Harm Reduction that seemed geared to assist the listener with the sometimes bumpy reorientation process.  You’re going to need it, as this new internal world is populated by both natural wonders and piss covered floors.  Set free to find a new illusion?  This seems to be the main dilemma the album is grappling with.  I Have To Feed Larry’s Hawk ultimately leaves the listener to decide the answers for themselves.  Be forewarned, regardless of what you think, that hawk still needs to be fed.  As Presley notes, there’s always a danger in leaving the past.

Order the album via Drag City.