Meatbodies
So just to get it out of the way, yeah it’s obvious that Chad Ubovich, Charles Mootheart, Ty Segall and Cory Hanson have at one time or another borrowed from each other’s record collections. There are a lot of the same influences at work here, and while the lazy review could write Meatbodies off as just a carbon copy of any of the others, Ubovich has built an impressive tower of psychedelic pop in his own right on Alice. What he’s really excelled at is finding a way to seamlessly intertwine the best hallmarks of any ’70s guitar freak’s record shelf. There’s the Bolan warble bumping into Syd Barrett’s own tremolo madness, neither affectation overtaking the other completely in a dance of madness. The band builds matchstick temples to Sabbath and burn them down with the glee of bubblegum glam. They know that Bowie and The Sweet both wanted to make you bop and treat them on equal footing, no hero hierarchy here, egalitarian aesthetics copped to the core.
In an age when it’s possible to completely saturate yourself in an almost overwhelming amount of musical output, it’s impressive to see someone take his obsessions and lacquer them together into a monster of an album that doesn’t whiplash between styles like a giddy kid in a candy store. Stacking LEGO® pulled from your best bins can muddle more than it can shine, but the band builds a solid psych foundation that keeps me coming back time and again for another dose of cotton thick clouds of fuzz. Ubovich, along with West Coast studio backbone Eric Bauer shellac this sucker into its shiny fanged form. They indulge (heavily) in the effects of their forefathers, but let them color strategically out of the lines in hypnotic shapes rather than make a splotchy mess.
There’s an overarching theme here of “war, sex, politics and religion,” but to be fair that covers a lot of ground and while the lyrics stick Alice together some, it’s more of an album about feel and tone, time and space. It’s the past skinned, sliced, packaged and shuffled into an order that feels natural. It’s the countless hours of a music junkie made material and fed through a Big Muff for good measure. If that’s not enough for you, then door’s on the right, be sure to hit the black light your way out and let the rest of us fuzz out grinnin.’
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