I've never caught Psychic Ills live, but...four NYCers with a stiffy for psych-rock space rituals? No wonder they keep their hair at face-shielding length. When casting out into the improvisatory dark, eye contact is off limits. You're in a private headspace, where doing your thing right means doing it to the exclusion of external phenomena. The more withdrawn each individual member, the more cohesive the group dynamic: Is this meditation class? No, it's the paradox by which Dins lives and dies.
Suffice it to call the Ills a jam band: Dins eschews conventional structure and blurs the line between song and improvisation-- there are eight tracks here but fewer tunes. The album's opening sweep tucks its only riff three minutes deep into "Electriclife", the second track, buttressing it on both sides with liquid metallic noise. Amid the seeming chaos, sudden spurts of song are actually quite effective-- they don't come across as submerged, but rather as standing sentry over the teeming formlessness.
My only wish is for a little more synthesis; Dins is often overly simplistic, playing the soft/loud game rather than tackling the more complicated task of consolidation. After all, noise and melody need not be mutually exclusive. But that's a choice not a maxim, so I won't say closer "Another Day Another Night" suddenly "gets it," but rather just follows the tack of forebearers like My Bloody Valentine, Spacemen 3, and Hawkwind. Riding a galloping, less drum-circular tom rhythm, Psychic Ills heap on whooshes of vox, cavernous guitar trills, and flecks of sublime, barely audible glockenspiel. The volume holds steady, resisting the call to climax with gratuitous feedback and flailing drum fills. Instead we get a beautiful, legible guitar solo-- the line we've waited an album for. The song is breezy at eight-plus minutes where a bottom-heavy track like "January Rain" sorta slogs despite finishing in under six.
This well-rendered, highly enjoyable debut drags on me the same way as that Black Mountain LP did. Both albums have wonderful moments but their creators are a little too comfortable in their own sloth. Maybe it's a drugs-unlock-it thing-- a valid excuse in their book, maybe, but not mine. Or maybe Psychic Ills are feeling each other out as improvisational musicians-- a process that can take years-- while learning the contours of one of rock's most challenging idioms.
