Uncle Bad Touch
Uncle Bad Touch
Bumby

Retro fuzz from a trio of Montreal scamps, including Priestess’ main man, Mikey Heppner, who’s found a weirdly raucous outlet for his progressive tendencies with friends Kathryn McCaughey and Shawn Butchart, who come together with all the charm and mystery of urban ne’er-do-wells sittin’ on a stoop, smokin’ cigarettes, and slackin’ off. Much like the band’s maligned name, the songs on Uncle Bad Touch’s self-titled debut scratch away at your mind like a repressed memory and blink like a wired third eye thanks to all the lo-fi riffing, vocal squealing, freaky grooves, and meandering flute. What I mean is there’s whole bunch of strange love (natch) on this record, a sort of acid-fried satori and electric soul that seems to draw its sketchy influences from the downer rock of the late 60s, and should please fans of Witch, RTX/Royal Trux, Danava, or Dungen.

Listen to “Blow Your Mind” from Uncle Bad Touch!

Hypnos 69
Legacy
Elektrohasch

Hypnos 69 say that their latest album, Legacy, is their magnum opus. Given that it’s been four years since their last release, The Eclectic Measure, and given that Legacy‘s seven songs clock in at around 73 minutes, I’d be taking their claims of grandeur very seriously. These Belgian lotus eaters have been severely underrated when it comes to flying the freak flag of psychedelic rock n’ roll, and it seems like they’ve decided that Legacy is going to be the huge flashing neon sign they’re erecting on the skyline of your mind. The longest trips on deck, opener “Requiem (For a Dying Creed)” and closer “The Great Work,” are swirling bookends of carpet-riding narco-bliss, full of fuzzy jams, wild, druggy solos (that’s guitar, flute, and horn), and dreamy passages. And really, you get the same kind of thing with the songs in between but in shorter doses, and it all hangs together with the loose architecture of a house of cards floating in the clouds. It’s like they’ve taken some Lorenzo Woodrose-inspired acid rock and twisted it into a never-ending strand of progressive licorice for one mind-bending treat. Awesomely far out, this one. Legacy might turn out to be just that.

Listen to “The Sad Destiny We Lament” from Legacy!

We’ve run into a real string of bad movies lately, haven’t we? Not that I thought Parasomnia was going to be any different, and not that you haven’t come to expect bad movie write-ups from me, but when you hoe the low budget road, there’s usually some awesome surprises waiting for you. Besides, this one was written and directed by William Malone, the same dude who did House on Haunted Hill and Feardotcom (yeah, okay, also not great but at least these were legitimate theatrical releases and starred people like Geoffrey Rush, Famke Janssen, and Stephen Dorff), so I suppose one could gleam a glimmer of horror hope from this one. But all hope was quickly dashed and there weren’t any surprises waiting for me. Only a mundane, low budget fantasy lost in a shitty dream world of love, blood, and madness.

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