The Amazing’s Christoffer Gunrup would probably make fast friends with Mark Kozelek. At least to the extent you can predict anyone would. Not only is Picture You one of the surprisingly rare rock records of recent vintage drawing legitimate, discernible inspiration from Led Zeppelin, Gunrup just so happens to be influenced by the same exact songs Kozelek namechecked on his spellbinding autobiography "I Watched the Film ‘The Song Remains the Same’". There’s the Fender Rhodes hum of "No Quarter", as well as the capability to touch on jazz and prog-rock without being "jazzy" or "proggy". The Amazing spend vast stretches of time strolling the verdant expanses of "Rain Song", as well as basking in the glimmering acoustic sunrises of "Bron-Yr-Aur". And Gunrup’s vocals are that of a very melancholy kid mesmerized by everything, one who did see Zep as gods, but benevolent and nurturing ones—more Pan and Demeter than Dionysus.
The end result is a record that reverently draws from a dazzling array of past masters only to short-circuit critical capacity. Discussion of Picture You can only end up with slack-jawed remarks about how goddamn pretty it is. Stranger still is how the adverbs you’d feel tempted to latch onto that superlative somehow makes that seem like a bad thing: "obscenely pretty," "ridiculously beautiful," etc. But the Amazing specialize in a beauty that isn’t airbrushed or slick or antiseptic, the kind captured by lad mags or Trevor Horn, everything exaggerated to emphasize its status as eye or ear candy. Nor is it smudged or vaporous like shoegaze. It doesn’t even make a full attempt at an au naturel realism of folk or the otherworldliness of psych-rock, though it does touch on those aspects. Picture You is elemental rock—earthy, molten, aquatic, but using each of their qualities to soothe rather than destroy or intimidate.
Opener "Broken" is the Amazing at their most grand, but not grandiose—the guitars dip in the same deep water as the Cure's Disintegration, while Moussa Fadera plays his drums with the activity of Keith Moon or John Bonham. Yet, the guitars merely come off as being coated with morning dew, every cymbal splash sounds like it’s releasing a light ocean spray. Even when "Safe Island" ends with nearly three minutes of blistering harmonic feedback, it’s never meant to overwhelm, it’s more the encroaching low heat of a sweat lodge. This part is notably absent from the "single" version.
The Amazing’s previous album was called Gentle Stream and very much earned that title; this one is more like a lazy river—you know, the weekend summer outing where an inner tube with a cooler of beer drags behind, long stretches of a calming buzz that evolves into some serious disorientation only after you figure out where you’ve been the past six minutes. This is pretty much the whole point of "To Keep It Going", where Gunrup repeats the title and only the title for its five-minute duration. Picture You doesn’t jam or meander, it drifts knowing its final destination is preordained—“Fryshusfunk” and the title track take a few minutes to commit to basic song structures before getting into vast stretches of lead guitar interplay that never quite becomes soloing. The Amazing can be concise, though prototypical psych-folk fusions like "Tell Them You Can’t Leave" turn out to be the parts where Picture You feels like it loses focus.
There is focus here, though it's hard to elucidate: While the Amazing could certainly find themselves winning over the same festival crowds swooning to Tame Impala’s Lonerism and the War on Drugs’ Lost in the Dream, what Picture You lacks compared to those albums is, well, a frame. Or at least the knowledge of who "you" is. Gunrup doesn’t commit his lyrics to the credits, and he even admits this on the band's website: "I have no idea how to describe the songs. If you theorize about the songs, it ruins the tension and passion. Just shut the fuck up and play, but play good."
In other words, he might have no better idea than I do about what these songs are actually about. And I certainly have no idea. "The Headless Boy" is the drumless acoustic ballad where the lyrics are most audible and it’s as slippery as the song called "Fryshusfunk". But during the Meddle-esque "Circles", Dunrup mentions watching Beverly Hills Cop II, whose soundtrack contains songs such as "I Want Your Sex" and Bob Seger’s "Shakedown", which exist in a completely different solar system than the one occupied by "Circles". But the impression given by Gunrup is that the same headspace that would lead someone to watching Beverly Hills Cop II in its entirety is similar to the one that’s amenable to Picture You—a fugue state where you somehow manage to be happily committed to your own incapacitation.
