skyjelly

many thanks to Ilya Sitnikov for recommending a rather nifty double cassette set from Skyjelly that features two albums – ‘black panthers’ and ‘priest, expert, or wizard?’ – heading out in strictly limited quantities via the doom trip imprint. Now I’ll be honest in saying that due to time constraints we’ve yet to take in the whole set, however initial listening pickings have put us in mind of a very youthful black dice or more pertinently, Animal Collective and here I’m talking ‘spirit they’re gone, spirit they’ve vanished’ in so much as they appear to be operating in a sound vacuum cross wiring familiar sonic tropes and forging newly hatched hybrids, a sun bursting intoxica of psychedelia, kraut, kosmiche, earthbeat and funk which emerges from the narcotic fog of ‘sixes’ – a killer slab of eye swirling mesmeric voodoo boogie which quite frankly puts the likes of Goat et al in the shade – and then proceeds to pic n’ mix its way through six decades of pop to morph a distractively sexy mix tape of sorts. What strikes you pretty much immediately is the no holds barred creative pool unfurling and blossoming here, yes the Stones are apparent, both Rolling and Roses, yet there’s also Funkadelic, Sly Stone, Shamen, Spacemen 3 and so many more, yet while you can easily drop names in truth they sound like none of them, they appear and disappear like fleeting navigation markers. Take for instance ‘Acosta’ a psychotropic melting pot whose subdued and spaced out voodoo earthbeat takes you down so many sonic rabbit holes that you find yourself lost in its amorphous terraforming lysergic folds. Just when you think your getting the measure of the blighters they go and throw in – I think its called ‘krilltastica’ – heck my eye sights seriously struggling, anyhow this crookedly cool babe literally smokes, seductively prowling around a wonderfully stoned out noir soul framing. As to the ‘priest’ part of proceedings, things appear a lot looser with the schizoid fuzz frazzled freakbeat goonery of the wigged out ‘watch out’ proving to be the sets head fracturing sore thumb sharply contrasting with the dream drifting mellowness of the parting ‘that’s where the modern is’ recalling I should say, Mercury Rev. if I didn’t know better and as late in the year it is, this might well be the album to which all others are judged.  https://doomtrip.bandcamp.com/album/blank-panthers-priest-expert-or-wizard-2