Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 26/10/09
Label: Pagan Love Vibrations

"We're not interested in forwards or backwards, we're shapeless and sexless", proclaim psychedelic missionaries Gaz Cobain and Brian Dougans. It's a commendable statement of intent, for sure, but in the Future Sound Of London duo's endeavours to tie-dye our minds with "cosmic space music" they've struggled, like a longhair climbing out of his favourite beanbag, to move much beyond that period between when The Beatles grew facial hair and men started wearing capes in the mid-'70s.

It's not a problem per se. Operating on a similar, but slightly less nerdy psychedelic plane as Andy Votel and his related gang of boot sale-scouring vinyl addicts, some of the twisted tuneage on TAA's second 44-track compilation will already be warmly familiar to those of a lysergic persuasion - Comus, Hawkwind, Faust, Pentangle and Melanie, for example. And the weird, spooky stuff by Ed Askew and Friends Of Dean Martinez is what keeps folk going back to Stuart Maconie's terrific "Freak Zone" show on 6 Music every Sunday.

For the uninitiated, then, this is a mix of funky, breakbeat-propelled rock'n'roll, folk and prog from a time when the Kaftan reigned supreme and sitars, the jazz flute, pan-pipes, Theremin, whimsical voices used like Hammond organs and toe-nail clippings (as percussion) were creditable tools employed for widening the sound. Teetering on the verge of madness, it's the gritty grooves that hook listeners, just like Noel Gallagher, who called the first of these comps "f*cking mind-blowing." With the blistering "Elephant Man" by Bo Diddley on board, this is - more sensibly put - just as lovely.

However, if the duo's concept, as they like to tell us, is to take the pulse of psychedelia as it continues on its long journey, then their heavy reliance on the past isn't quite as satisfying. First time out they featured modern-day practitioners Pop Levi, Yellow Moon Band, Espers, Devendra Banhart and, most importantly, one of the torch-bearers of new psychedelia, comic disco aces The Emperor Machine. This time, ignoring the tribal cacophony made by Gang Gang Dance and Boredoms, and the narco-blues of MV & EE, we have just folk-jokers Circulus, an incongruous Holy F*ck with their electro punk-house, Animal Collective (of course) and TAA's remix of "Falling Down" by those way-out rockers...Oasis.

Should Cobain and Dougans wish to continue down this path - and after ten years of DJing and pod-casting this sort of thing, it seems they will - The Amorphous Androgynous will have to expand their minds even further, man.

    by Chris Parkin