vespero

Confession time. I’ll admit that for years I couldn’t, wouldn’t and didn’t entertain any Floyd on the hi-fi unless of course it had some semblance of Syd Barrett attaching to it, call it the arrogance, the impetuosity or the naivety of a teenager, but they just didn’t register. Where the reasoning to account for such an arbitrary attitude emerged is still a puzzle, perhaps it was a subliminal mark of support for the outsider Barrett at the way the band treated him or the fact that wherever Floyd records existed in record collections of friends and other such then sure as hell other such evils as Yes, Sky and Toto would be among the proudly showing cache. To a callow youth anything not nailed at 100mph, greased in day-glo and done in less than 3 minutes wasn’t worth listening to. Age mellows you I’m happy to say. That said even in those flippant and fanciful times I always had a soft spot for ‘careful with that axe, Eugene’ – can’t recall exactly when I first heard it but I do remember some Floyd special broadcast by the BBC wherein they played an old live performance they recorded for one of Peel’s late 60’s broadcast jaunts – perhaps ‘top gear’ or maybe ‘perfumed garden’. I mention all this as a nonsensical pre-amble to introduce this absolute – to coin a Terry Thomas phrase – ding dong duo from the much admired Vespero. Hailing from Russia, Vespero caught our ear and indeed our affection after turning in a quite sublime take on Faust’s ’Jennifer’ this time last year as part of a Xmas double header with Temple Music. Now afforded the luxury of a 7 inch in their own right which incidentally, comes lavishly adorned on coloured wax replete with double sided poster insert, Russia’s finest psych alchemists point their radar towards Floyd’s atom heart for two utterly out there blissed kissed covers. If I didn’t know better their interpretation of the aforementioned ‘careful with that axe, Eugene’ sounds as though its been hand rolled with chemical enhancements and softly pressed into a humungous bong, lit and spaced away. Faithfully scribed albeit mellowed into an amorphous kosmic kissed astral carpet ride and graced with a trancey far out and tripping vibe that by just being near you get high. That said the goodies here are to be found on the flip side which opts for a frazzled slice of ‘one of these days’ here found gutted, re-tooled and trimmed with a decidedly darker persona and a more fortified hyper driven undercarriage and trip wired with a seriously freakish spacey mid point wherein everything goes weird and woozy amid a cyclonic sun storm of rippling pulsars and diode chattering intermissions before re-tracking back on course for some serious wig flipped warping kraut gouged head pummelling.