With the arrival of Sorcerer, Tonstartssbandht now have seventeen releases. It’s a daunting amount of music even though brothers Andy and Edwin White have been upping entire albums to their Bandcamp page—which phonetically pronounces as “TAHN-starts-bandit”—since 2008 (not counting Andy’s solo projects as Andy Boay and Edwin’s as Eola). While Orlando-born and bred, for the better part of their existence the White boys lived in different cities, resorting to swapping their drum and Danelectro guitar parts back and forth online. It might scan as an awkward way to cherry-pick and organize jams, but their saving grace is the type of secret language and telepathic connection that only the tightest of siblings can have.
After calling Brooklyn home, the brothers are back in Orlando and the type of ramshackle pastiche that they once enacted via email must now cohere in the same room. For the most part, Sorcerer succeeds, moving their sound forward while maintaining their penchant for detours. Tonstartssbandht keeps the lo-fi qualities of their previous albums intact, the hiss of the room and a quivering snare coil audible at the start of “Breathe.” It’s the sound of Guided by Voices swapping out their arena rock fantasies of being in the Who for being a member of Amon Düül’s Munich commune instead.
“Breathe and know you’re forgiven/Screams so peculiar to the living,” one brother whispers like a ’60s sage just back from a particularly messianic acid trip. “Breathe” moves at a deliberate pace, favoring slack drum rolls while Andy lays down guitar lines clear in tone, the two never quite settling into any one meter or stanza length. But about two minutes in, a voice swaddled in effects warns “I won’t keep you safe,” the guitar thickens and a tom roll thunders across the song, signaling lift off. As is their wont, the psychedelic effects are mostly kept to the vocals, allowing Andy’s clean-strummed figures to ring out like a bell and build upwards. The siblings harmonize, the rhythms choogle along, a harmonica drones some ten minutes in and everything turns weightless and dissolves at song’s end.
Rather than enact American psychedelic rock of the ’60s, Tonstartssbandht treats their psychedelic sprawls much like Amon Düül II did circa Yeti. Each number exists less as a means to drive a blues song into your frontal lobes like a trepan and more like a trip through a dark forest. The epic songs meander from darkness to clearing back into bramble, with no clear path being taken, only to stumble suddenly upon a plateau. The lyrics too move from darkness (“Life is long as long as you’re lonely”) to light (“If you don’t believe me, that’s chill”). During a previous era, the brothers might have been stuck with recreating the likes of Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix (much like the latter, their father played guitar upside-down), but thanks to decades of reissues of psychedelic music apart from the U.S.-UK axis, be it the twee amoebas of Incredible String Band, German krautrock or Swedish cosmonauts like Träd, Gräs Och Stenar and International Harvester, the boys have a broader and deeper template to draw upon and they pull from all of the above.
The three expansive pieces of Sorcerer resemble trips in how they evolve from moment to moment, but at times it means sacrificing some of the experimental eclecticism of their previous albums, be it the loopy chewed-tape beats of “5FT7,” the thrashy outbursts of “I’m a Welsh Souper,” and songs that evoke the jamborees of early Animal Collective. That said, the foggy coherence of thirteen-minute closer “Opening” careens from high to nebulous high, finding a wobbly groove like Creedence Clearwater Revival early on, then revving into heavy-fuzz near the eight-minute mark. It’s fierce like Blue Cheer could get, but just as quickly as it settles in, the two ease off the gas for a woozy interlude. “I hope you know what you’re doing/I don’t know what to say to you,” they sing in their uncanny, off-kilter harmony, and it’s unclear whether they are singing that to their fans or just amongst themselves. It encapsulates the psychedelic experience in a couplet, offering enlightenment and bafflement both.
Correction: The review originally misstated where the band lives. It has been updated to accurately reflect they currently live in Orlando, Fla.
