LAIR

The folks at Guruguru Brain never steer you wrong and it’s always nice when they find a new offering just outside of their own bubble of Japanese psychedelia. The latest pickup at the label is from Indonesian band LAIR. The band’s new album, produced by Kikagaku Moyo’s Go Kurosawa, is threaded with a propulsive strain of psychedelia that digs into local rhythms while also nodding to Turkish psych as well as surrounding South Asian strains. Songs on Ngélar quiver with a defiant energy, picking up celebratory tones at times, but often also riding a line between danger and darkness. The band digs into themes of economic hardship and the effects that industrialization has played on their town of Jatiwangi, once a great hub of clay and terracotta production. That tension plays into the band’s sound — a feeling of wanting to uphold tradition, but of being crushed by commerce.

The band reflects their cultural history through their instruments themselves, fashioning them out of local clay. They turn rough hewn folk forms into a conduit for electric ache. Paired with the inclusion of singer-songwriter Monica Hapsari, who lends her vocals to several tracks on the album, the band’s sophomore album finds them carving out a modern gem of Eastern psych that should appeal as much to Sublime Frequencies heads as it will to fans of Khruangbin and Goat. Heavy, heady, and haunted at times, the works on Ngélar reverberate off of the horizon like a rolling storm and a steady rain. Guruguru fans won’t be disappointed, but this one also seems like an inroad for the uninitiated as well.

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