A Vital and Joyful Memory

I often reflect on psychedelic music, and what distinguishes psychedelic music as a particular classification in music. I frequently take the position that psychedelic music depends specifically upon a manipulation of technology in order to provoke or provide a template for psychological and emotional reflection and examination. After all, the art form is not itself a genre, borrowing instead from folk, country, and rhythm and blues songwriting conventions with manipulations and templates constructed within those time frames and structures. While I do not think that such a definition of psychedelic music captures the phenomenon entirely, I do think that it explains for the eclectic development of the psychedelic tradition in rock.

One of my friends often challenges me, asking whether psychedelic music is a creative dead-end. In doing so, he often cites efforts by psychedelic bands to dive into the standard conventions of their songwriting backbones, eventually producing records that are more folk or country or rhythm and blues than psychedelic. Of course, there is also the ever-present history of non-psychedelic bands that take a voyage into technological manipulation and indulge themselves for one album, only to return to their standard convention once more. I do not have an answer for his challenges, except to note that technological manipulation cannot be a dead-end so long as technology exists and the mind develops through history with that technology, develops a relationship with it, and interacts with it. In this manner, psychedelic music is more of a challenge, an infinite subconscious beneath all intersections of technology and songwriting, simply waiting for a demigod or mad scientist to unfold developments in music that are ripe for psychological and emotional reflection.

Psychedelic music is necessarily sensual, fully immersed in that which is sensible in order to clear the terrain and barriers between affectivity and intellect.

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Darker My Love released their third LP, Alive as You Are, in the United States yesterday. Judging from comments from the band, statements on the development of this record, and the development of their live show, I fully expected something different. My expectations were confirmed when I heard the band's two samples, "Dear Author" and "Split Minute." Upon listening to the record, I found that my expectations reached in the wrong direction, and the result was a listening experience that was completely surprising, joyful, emotionally engaging.

At every turn in the record, the band shows their flexibility, musicianship, and songcraft, showcasing their profound ability to drive your mind through rich traditions without sounding old, tired, or forced. From previous interviews with the band that I have read or watched over time, it is clear that the band fosters a certain honesty about the type of music they want to create, and it is not surprising that I find their explorations through the storied pages of rock'n'roll to be fully unpretentious and completely innocent.

The group already provided a wide pallet of sounds in their first two LPs, and this record continues a journey that does not simply run through the history of rock, but also runs through the band's own catalog. Darker My Love is a group that explores every corner of their sonic space, every implication and aspect of their musicianship and songwriting. This is where the band's flexibility comes from, and it's not a flexibility that denies them identity, but rather a flexibility that allows them to freely create without regard to identity first.

Working through the band's genealogy, the direct recording and dry production were surprising in some regard, switching the balance between vocal performance and musical performance from the previous records. However, the ringing arpeggios, shuffling rhythms, and bright timbre follow aspects of "People" and most of the latter half of the band's self-titled debut, as well as "Immediate Undertaking," "Pharaoh Sanders Tomb," and "Even in your lightest day" from 2. Within their own discography, there are several aspects to Darker My Love, and if 2 followed the path of "Helium Heels" and "Claws and Paws," this one works alongside other trends in the band's development.

Instead of emotionally reflecting against waves of fuzz and dense, layered instrumental passages, the listener is presented with immediate, earnest vocal performances that run through parables in the lyrics that invoke automatic writing, or a method of presenting images to help one to recall navigation through the world's spaces and situations.

The production and imagery of the record created an experience that was immensely enjoyable throughout; the record helped to guide me through my memories, by leading me through places that I have already visited, but perhaps could not directly recall, or failed to see from a specific aspect. This does not mean that the record looks backwards; on the contrary, an engagement in sensation and the sensible world, framing and developing memories, in turn helps us to develop our own actions and attitudes toward the world. This is perhaps the greatest psychedelic achievement of Alive as You Are; inverting the technological manipulation in favor of a direct aesthetic results in a record that sound deceptively simple and straightforward, but rewards with continual focus and reflection.