Now that Elephant 6 is officially a closed book, maybe it's time to look elsewhere than Athens, Georgia for the next psych-pop explosion. The psych strongholds of old-- the Bay Area, East Texas, Canterbury, etc-- won't do; they have too much history and too few new ideas. No, a genre that has fallen on such hard times of late needs a fresh start in a fresh place. I suggest Bloomington, Indiana. Now, I'll admit I'm more than a little biased; I used to live there, and in a lot of ways, I still think of it as my home. But putting as much bias as I can aside, there's a band there that I think could lead the next charge of paisley frock. They're called the Impossible Shapes.
Laughter Fills Our Hollow Dome is the Impossible Shapes' second proper full-length and it's got enough catchy, bouncy melodies to make Robert Schneider sully his Osh-Koshes, and enough of a fuzzy lo-fi glow to make Will Hart re-bury his tape recorder. Lyrically, Shapes frontman Chris Barth writes like Bob Pollard drunk on Krishnamurti tomes, and his voice recalls a boyish, Midwestern George Harrison. "Spirits Enter", "Dancing in Heaven", and "Graceful Arc" combine a ecumenical spiritualism with a fondness for analog keyboards and hazy pop. "Jesus and Squares" sets a more ominous tone, ending with the words, "Try and love everything that is not dead"-- it'd stand as a recollection of a bad trip if not for the rousing, galloping rhythm that powers it.
"Go Somewhere Beautiful", a two-parter bridged by a spiraling keyboard-driven interlude, is almost as pure a picture of naïve hippie optimism as could be hoped for in these troubled times and, as such, is this close to being a defiant protest song. "Look for an Opening" and "Found a Sister", on the other hand, have a whimsical, almost Broadway musical style recalling Love's Brian Maclean. Meanwhile, "Another Flooded Dream" and "Supermaze" show the Shapes stretching out into collage-style chaos-- like their forbearers in Olivia Tremor Control were fond of doing-- without losing sight of the song.
And indeed, The Song is always primary with these guys. Even when they do momentarily stray from it in order to modulate the perspective or bring a revealing distortion into play, it demonstrates just how strong the songs are in their underlying foundations. These detours never sound distracting or gratuitous like is so often the case when a "song" band wants to get "way out" and "blow your mind" with some "spacey jams". Rather, all experimentation is brought into the service of the song itself. Regular acid-eating Hoagy Carmichaels, these kids.
"Across the River", while not one of the most instantly memorable songs on the album, might be its spiritual center. A short, simple song, beautifully wrought from acoustic guitar, piano, and organ, Barth and multi-instrumentalist Aaron Deer trade off singing the refrain, "Inside this great home." And that's what this album does best: it transports you fully into a dream-like world, a home built of warm, full sound and winding corridors of melody. And when it's over, and you're back in the harsh real world, all you want to do is revisit the world of Hollow Dome where things are simple and beautiful.
Psychedelic pop may not be in vogue at the moment, and Elephant 6 folding was just a symbol of this change in the musical climate, but that doesn't mean there aren't still a number of good-- or even great-- psych-pop bands keeping the dream of '67 alive, and without being too awfully retro about it. A number of musicians who sprung from the fertile soil of the Elephant 6 collective continue to make compelling music (Will Hart's Circulatory System and Jeremy Barnes' various projects, for example), not to mention the various (heavier) psych bands coming out of the Philadelphia area. And then there are relative newcomers like the Memphis-based Snowglobe and the Impossible Shapes from Bloomington. Hopefully, these bands will stick it out to reap the rewards when the winds of popular taste inevitably turn back their way.
