the honey pot

And to the Honey Pot who feature amid their assembled number Icarus Peel and a certain Jacqueline Bourne who will pop up later here in her Crystal alter ego, ‘to the edge of the world’ be their debut long platter, not sure whether its out on yer actual vinyl or not – hey ho. Perfect turntable apparel for those among you who prefer your sounds momentarily dinked in brightly coloured and softly effervescent shards of 60’s west coast pop albeit spruced and cooled in the lazy eyed arrest of an English psychedelic eccentricity, there’s no doubting that the Honey Pot know their way around the cobbling up of nostalgia honed radiant feel good pop. Informed and applying all the tricks and trappings on the crafting of purist psych pop ‘to the edge of the world’ offers a well crafted myriad of kaleidoscopic mosaics that chirp and cool to a liberal splashing of rainbow colouring and darkly metered flashings of monochrome murmurs. Its upon these grooves that you’ll hear the unreal spell crafting wooziness permeating through the hypnotic grooving of ‘paper garden’, very much flavoured in a deceptively desirable dialect fashioned from an early career Jefferson Airplane dream coat wherein quietly sowing on the magic buttons you’ll find Nico busying herself hiding in the shadows. The Nico references pop up again on the enchanting ‘love is green’ – a love noted baroque bouquet of string seduced pastoral posies while wah wah’s, arabesque melodies, spiralling sitars and a seriously out there and gone blues groove is the order of the day for ’roses will grow’ as it nods in equal measure to both Cream and Mayall. Those among you much taken with those rarefied platters put out by Eleanor Rigby will do well to swiftly skip to ’hazy recollections’ which I must admit has something of a distinct pre Abba woozy folk flavoured aura about its personage. Elsewhere and having us reaching for our prized 7‘s by the Murmurs of Irma, the gloriously homely and slightly kooky ‘comfy’s honey jar’ is lushly scented with the strange musical herbal essences of the Purple Gang albeit as though rethreaded through the sound boards of Keith West and scalped with a late 60’s London town dialect notably a certain Deram era Bowie in his Newley wannabe phase. The same devices are employed on indelibly arse stamped ’made in England’ beauty ’Florence’ which jinks and jaunts as though a Keith Waterhouse script doodled and dreamed away with a Small Faces smirk. Darker in tone the freakish psych blues of the shimmer toned Hammond laced ‘tuppence for your thoughts’ is kissed with something of the wasted persona of the misunderstood while parting shot ‘sweet orange sunshine’ proves to be the sets deceptive trick or treat beautifully harnessed as it is in a misty mystique that wallows to a archaic English folk tongue and finds it shimmered in the kind of sweetly turned bewitchment you’d more readily expect of platters put out by Owl Service, Men an Tol and Sproatly Smith. All said a quietly unassuming classic.