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Psychic Ills - Mirror Eye (The Social Registry)

The Brooklyn improvisational robo-psychedelia quartet, Psychic Ills, debuted in 2006 with their acclaimed album, Dins. The band just liberated their second album, Mirror Eye. The record is intoxicatingly groovy: an eclectic compilation of synth sounds and primitive beats. A notably eastern theme vibrates throughout; sitar-y guitar riffs shake, tribal hand drums rattle in raga, and unintelligible vocals echo like a sage’s song on a misty mountain. The synthesizer is overbearing at times, at others climactically orgasmic. Overbearing in “Sub Synth,” an entire track devoted solely to the synthesizer, modulating to create this airplane or spaceship power up or take off that dies down into shutdown. Climactically orgasmic in tunes like “I Take You as My Wife Again,” wherein the synth produces this helicopter-percussive beat, paints a picture of a chopper that eventually finds an ominous jungle of clattering symbols and reverberating whistles and vocals that then grooves into a simple, mid-tempo electro rave party. Mirror Eye reflects a young band with a distinct style, impressive range, and achieves a sort of robo-primitive awareness that may lead (and bang along) the way for aspiring artists of improvisational electro-psychedelia.

-SNICK