Although the tracks are, in the main, built round acoustic guitar, there is enough going on sonically to make a case for this LP being much more of a psychedelic than a folk album.
Cabinet of Natural Curiosities – Searchlight Needles
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Now this is a great LP, full of verve and punch, subtlety and great balance. Little Ice Age is a brilliant, crystalline, slightly psychedelic opener, a song with enough body and confidence to make the listener think they are onto something. Let us not forget that there has to be something very special about a singer song-writer LP these days, as they are ten-a-penny. Sun is a hypnotic love song of sorts, the arrangements isn’t far removed from the psyched/out pastoral elegies that Krishna von Golowka recorded on the Cosmic Jokers label.
Although the tracks are, in the main, built round acoustic guitar, there is enough going on sonically to make a case for this LP being much more of a psychedelic than a folk album. A good example is the beautiful keyboard ’refrain’ and weird noises on For Sparrow, which would otherwise be a very sparse track indeed, lasting as it does a whopping eight minutes. And Glass builds in a sublime way, the way the tempo is kept, and the subtle introduction of instrumentation is superb, it’s very Hippy-Gothicke at times, especially with the Robin Guthrie/style guitar fuzz. The track reminds me of a sublime mix of Gong and Espers.
Breathy, dreamy psychedelia of the first order.
Words: Richard Foster