Lo-fi groove, repeated refrain, a washed out sixties groove and faux crowd noise before horns kick in and we eventually drift into folky, then rock opera, then trippy territories before a Queen-like phoenix-rising guitar soaring in deep into the track and all the elements come together. Purson certainly know how to open an album and at six and a half minutes it’s a bold step for a band that gives the initial impression of Jefferson Airplane meets Blues Pills at a Queen show…
After that title track then depending on your take on psychedelia then Purson will either sound like challenging, intelligent, boundary-pushing beings or players in a whimsical puppet musical.
The jazzy ‘Dead Dodo Down’ stomps ‘Germaniacally’ (my new word for the year); whilst ‘Pedigree Chums’ is just trippy, and whilst ‘The Window Cleaner’ hints at Metallic West Coast psychedelia; ‘The Sky Parade’ takes a gentler Folkier more expansive route to that high.
It’s all rather Prog, all rather Psych and will either excite the hell out of you, confuse you or have you running for the hills depending on your persuasion. It is not anything close to ‘verse-chorus-verse-chorus-solo/bridge-chorus’ land.
It’s interesting to read reviews of Purson casting them as the saviours of Rock and Roll, daubed as crazy saints or iconoclasts and purveyors of the psychedelic rock and roll dream. To others they’ll just come across as arty types who took a few too many stimulants, they might even seem a little creepy and even, god-forbid, a little twee. As a reviewer this is an important album as I can feel it being polarizing, I can feel the need to talk about this music, and that in Rock and Roll, no matter what you think of the tunes, is why we keep listening.
