Large Plants

Since their inception, UK psych collective Wolf People has been an RSTB staple. The band has always carried and out-of-time quality about them, something familiar, yet otherworldly. Their albums were steeped in Anglican-folk and fuzz-bitten psych, and as he eases into his time away from the band, songwriter Jack Sharp carriers a lot of those qualities with him into Large Plants. The opener is curled with the wood smoke that circles the kind of stone cottages that graced the covers of ‘70s rock albums It’s the kind of UK psychedelia that’s as comfortable crawling through stone circles as it is through British blues riffs. As The Carrier opens up, Large Plants embrace that quality, flirting with folk, trailing the kind of biker-psych raw nerve that populated Finders Keepers’ Man Chest Hair comp, and dredging up the peculiar pungence that’s kept Wolf People on the speakers for all these years.

Sharp has only seemed to embrace and immerse himself in the influences that have fed into his works in the past. If anything, Large Plants is more in tune with the druid decadence and factory floor pummel of the late ‘60s. The Carrier is a record that’s as familiar with Fresh Maggots and Trees as it is with Leaf Hound and Edgar Broughton Band. Sharp embraces a gnarled root vision of psychedelia — mossen, dank, overcast — English to its core. The mists swirl around The Carrier. The light shrinks from view, and a cold fog seeps from the speakers through every note. Whether this is a one-off diversion or Sharp’s next step, this is an essential part of the the Sharp’s legacy.