Psychedelic Cowboy

Brace yourselves: from the Tip HQ comes something that sounds completely unlike anything else around at the moment. In fact, the sound here has more in common with Tip’s 3D compilation than pretty much anything else I can think of. The Melovskys are from Mexico, but their music doesn’t sound like Mexican trance. There’s live vocals, but they’re not shit (mostly). And bottom line, it’s fullon about as far from the generic cookiecut style as you could ever expect. (This, by the way, is in keeping with the new label’s manifesto – check psyreviews’ interview with label boss Richard here. Most of all, what makes this significant is that you need to listen to it with new ears: it’s NOT a dancefloor album. It’s NOT from Israel. It’s NOT all about beatmatch, fade in, break, drop, beatmatch, fade out. Evolver kicks off the whole “grumbling hoon” kinda sound that drenches this album, and that in my humble opinion is the strongest thing about this release. Words won’t do justice to the bottomend here – lumbering and hefty, it’s a sweeping, swooshing bass that just blows holes in you, pushes you backwards against the wall, and farts in your face. It works perfectly on Crazy Rhythm, possibly the standout track here. Funky, mean, gnarly and eloquent, it has a sort of Sundance feel to it, with these madly disjointed sounds somehow coming together and creating a whirling, toblerone-bath of music. Blows Your Mind has a vocal that sounds like it was form an old 60’s hippy act, but then so do The Polyphonic Spree (and it sounds like them too). Anyway, aside from this you’ve got a chunky and very psychedelic tune. The vox and big Spanish-folky break may put some people off, but otherwise it’s an absolutely cracking tune. Hallucination takes the recipe a little darker, sounding more like something you’d expect to hear on Parvati…. midnight forest music with that mid/top toothcutter sound. Dig Deep’s vocals are certainly questionable: you’ve got a sort of punky females voice, and one of those harmonised alt.rock vocals (it sounds like someone, but I don’t know who, because I’m not 20 and I don’t wear black, nor do I skateboard). I can see what they’re doing here, putting a clever break into what’s otherwise a marvellous tune, and it still sounds fresh but…. well, the female voice is just bad. And the lyrics are baffling. But the rest of the tune’s good. So there. Desert Eagle .50 is a clever track, it’s deeper and has a sort of languid country feel to it. It’s got more flow to it (i.e. there’s no big breakdown going on), and hence it’s a more probable choice for DJs. Likewise Evolution #9, a large breakdown broken up with some awesome samples again from Snatch. It kicks: the riffs are tight and robotic, the groove is tight, and the attitude is perfect: until, that is, the dodgy final section with guitars, sub-Streets mockney-pointless emceeing seems to have infiltrated the barricades. Psychedelic Cowboy (For A Few Pesos More Mix) has a shuffled swank to it, with slide guitar aplenty and a genuinely Mexican feel. Finally, If U Want 2 is the traditional downtempo track at the end of an album, but for a change it’s interesting. The vocals are pretty strange, and an instrumental version would be an interesting one to hear. It drops neatly in and out of slomo 4-4, and the production and movement over the top is delightfully psychedelic. Overall then, it’s an interesting album – you can’t help but give it that. I don’t think it’ll appeal to most DJs, who aren’t going to find that it slots into too many sets too easily. But looking at it on its merits, it’s a genuinely new and individual piece of music bubbling up from the trance porridge. Which is how evolution works.