Zoned In: The Psychic Paramount: II

By Arturo Darvishire

For a certain class of people interested in Cosmic Transcendence via The Psychedelic Rock Music, the mere mention of Laddio Bolocko is enough to set hearts aflutter, precipitate spontaneous high-fiving, and, on occasion, be the beginnings of actual friendship (for the disbelievers: I've lived it). This, despite a short career, limited-run, low-budget releases, and a somewhat catastrophic early break-up. And all because that band's debut LP, Strange Warmings Of Laddio Bolocko-- issued in a cheap paper sleeve, with the liner note, "Recorded while living in utter poverty under the Brooklyn Bridge"-- is sort of a before/after moment in the history of music that attempts to fuse "out" and/or "free" music to the bona fide "rockness."

Laddio Bolocko followed up Strange Warmings with another LP and EP, which No Quarter included in a pretty essential 2-disc retrospective, The Life and Times Of Laddio Bolocko, in 2003. Laddio's members had graduated from living in "poverty" in DUMBO, Brooklyn to a more pastoral existence in the Catskills Mountains of Upstate New York; as we all know, it can be hard to be Angry Young Men when gazing out your studio window onto a scene of forests and mountains. In Real Time, their second and final full-length, was like a sigh of tranquility after the tightly wound, nails-on-chalkboard screech of Strange Warmings Of, and it was good.

Such was the state of things on one cold night in 2001, when I arrived at a music venue in the West Village to catch what was to be my first Laddio show, only to find the following hand-scrawled words on the door: "Laddio Bolocko won't be playing because they broke up." And well, that was it.

It became clear later that the band had essentially split in two, with Blake Fleming and Marcus Degrazia forming the significantly more pop-friendly Electric Turn To Me, and Drew St Ivany and Ben Armstrong returning to the outer reaches of atonal rock wizardry with their new project, The Psychic Paramount.

And what wizardry it is! No one else, alive or dead, can play the kind of screaming psychedelia that flows from Mr. St Ivany's guitar-- always on the verge of spiraling out of control, but actually a mere product of the man's mastery of the instrument. We hear this effect in its most distilled form on The Psychic Paramount's second record, Origins & Primitives Vol. I + II-- actually a collection of solo guitar sketches recorded by St Ivany prior to the band's formation-- but it’s no less present on any of the band's recordings. Bassist Ben Armstrong and drummer Jeff Conaway deliver a combination of pummeling repetition and beat tweakery; the result falls squarely within the rather rigid boundaries of "music that rocks the fuck out," while still sounding totally unique. Perhaps most impressive, the band always seems to be reaching for the next highest plane of dissonant, cosmic inspiration; they may make close to a dozen transitions per song, but they Never Drop The Ball. And it is this combination of elements, wrapped up in a slightly less chaotic/noise-centered approach to songwriting, that is pushed to the forefront on their new record, II.

History is littered with the corpses of bands who've attempted a sort of progged-out, Tower of Babel approach to songwriting; speaking as someone who is usually skeptical of this overly thoughtful musical genre, I never cease to be amazed at how effortless The Psychic Paramount make the climb up psych-rock mountain feel. In an earlier draft of this review, I considered describing their music as "freedom rock," but was loathe to even sarcastically associate them with the antediluvian titans of "jam on, bro" rock that have stalked the earth since people discovered it was fun to get high and play music. Still, when I had a chance to ask Drew and Ben to sum up what The Psychic Paramount was all about, "freedom" was one of the first words out of their mouths. And listening to even the opening notes of II, I think anyone would agree that it's undeniably the right word.

II is out now on No Quarter

Tags: psychic paramount, audio, zoned in

Posted by alteredzones on 04/05/2011 at noon.

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