Remember the sixties? Of course you don’t, they were ages ago. Yes, before MySpace. Before there was even anything to play MySpace on. It wasn’t Betamax compatible, was it? I’d say ask your parents, but if the telly is to be believed they were probably dancing naked in a park in San Francisco, or wrapped around a tree (or a Rolling Stone) in swinging London, under the whale-numbing influence of an uninhibitedly creative cocktail of drugs unsoiled by the impending degradation that 40 years of black market capitalism would inevitably bring. Or staring at an oil-light display, or something. Well, fact is, you don’t need to remember, or ask for potentially unreliable 2nd hand recollections, when we have time capsules like Chicago’s The Ponys, who may only be in their 20s but sound like they’ve been fermenting in a vacuum-sealed iron drum since 1965, like a Petri-dish of druggy pop, the thickening moss of psychedelia left to spawn and gather on their chests. There is potentially the successor to penicillin in there with them too.
At the heart of this dense, atmospheric fug though remains a perky, rigid pop strut, which is really the key to their competence, rather than the precision of the chemical balance alone. The moreish, toe-tapping opening track ‘Double Vision’ crawls around your ears like a vinyl copy of ‘My Sharona’ warped in the sun, playing at half speed, with Courtney Taylor-Taylor of The Dandy Warhols taking on the vocals as it ascends into a multi-pronged and slightly spaced-out jam, popping across the speakers, left to right and back again. Only about half as self-indulgent as that probably sounds. It’s a cracking tune, basically. They have much in common with the likes of The Warlocks and The Brian Jonestown Massacre; aware of themselves but not afraid to get lost in all the inevitabilities of a fully fledged wig-out. And with the Jesus & Mary Chain via Talking Heads stomp of ‘Small Talk’ and the Ride/Yo La Tengo shoegazing of ‘1209 Seminary’ there’s every chance that these will still be gathering kudos in a corner somewhere in the 40s.