‘Houston, we have a problem. We have some seriously psyched-out slacker dude shoegazing a trail of goofball psychedelia. There’s surf guitars in it, drums, something the kids are calling ‘synthesizers’ and he’s shoved the whole thing bally lot through a meteor cloud of echo and reverb units. I’m afraid that it’s another main B bus undervolt. And the crew are really bummed because it ain’t entirely rock and ain’t entirely electronic.’
Not that’s we’ve got anything to worry about though. It may be a tad unexpected having a young Mexican-American Texan youth charge through a set that references the dreamy noise-pop of an archly distorted My Bloody Valentine and the savvy astromonics of Lemon Jelly, but the results are pleasingly ‘dope’.
Opening track ‘Son Saves The Rest’ lays the first quaking brick in Yppah’s wall-of-sound, a wriggling techno sequence morphing into skin thumping, cymbal crashing shooting gallery as heroically epic as M83 and chemical as Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons. It swells, it blooms, it travels at Warp speed and it has the kind of mad, impossible song titles that only a man on drugs could possibly devise.
What more do you need to know? It’s spooky and it’s happy. Backwards.
Download:
’Gumball Machine Weekend’ – Delicious sixties retro shaken and stirred by all manner of loose, crazy breaks and beats. Surf’s up for shoegazers. The kind of thing DJ Shadow was doing when he was good.
‘Shutter Speed’ – Ever got stoned on flutes? Trancey and progressive. Free your mind and your codpiece will follow.
‘They Know What Ghost Know’ – Imagine Mike Oldfield recording Tubular Bells with a bundle of West Coast records on one side and an unruly stack of Doors records on the other. Like standing in a hall of mirrors. Only much noisier.
Yppah – ‘They Know What Ghosts Know’ review by Crud Magazine – Released 18.05.09