Talk In Tongues

Jesus, how much good psychedelic rock are we going to hear this year? Just this week, you can take your pick between new records from Thee Oh Sees, Dustin Lovelis, Psymon Spine, Dirty Fences, and Talk in Tongues. They are all doing different tripped out takes on stuff that was coming out forty years ago, and it all sounds fantastic and fresh.

Each member of Los Angeles foursome Talk In Tongues was a refugee from another band that just wasn’t working right when they first came together last year. Back then, they were barely acquaintances-guitarist and singer McCoy Kirgo remembers seeing his future bandmates at shows in their other bands, and then at parties after the shows. And if you looked into the music they’d already made, it didn’t quite make sense for them to put a band together. (Future bassist Waylon Rector wrote constantly, but all his songs were laptop-made synth-pop.)

But they almost immediately found that they all shared an unexpected common ground in several generations of psychedelic music, from the 60's Pink Floyd and 13th Floor Elevators through the unstoppable Creation Records roster in the 90's. By the end of their first practice together, they’d already discovered what they wanted to sound like. Says guitarist and singer Garrett Zeile: “I had songs I’d compiled over the last year, and they fit the direction we wanted-they were the building blocks. Then we all started contributing.”

The day after their first live show together, Talk in Tongues went into their home studio and recorded their first single “Still Don’t Seem To Care,” a dreamy, ethereal neo-psychedelic song mixed by Claudius Mittendorfer (Arctic Monkeys, Interpol). It was just the kind of sound he’d been looking for, says Kirgo: “I wanted to play big music, like something you’d hear at a fest like Glastonbury. That’s what made me want to dive into psychedelic rock.”

The band quickly signed with Fairfax Recordings, whose legendary in-house studio sealed the deal for the band. Slowly and a little bit unofficially, Fairfax Recording sessions that were supposed to just produce a B-side or two stretched into day after day of working on what would become their debut album. Everyone in Talk In Tongues writes and plays multiple instruments-they all play each other’s instruments, says Zeile-and everyone had a catalog of ideas they’d been saving. For the first time in his career, noticed drummer Bryan DeLeon, he was in a band where there was no such thing as writer’s block. And as the summer of 2014 ended, they decided they’d finished their full-length-two months after they’d walked in to record a single.

With production from Kevin Augunas (Cold War Kids, Edward Sharpe), their debut album Alone With A Friend links modern-day psychedelia with the foundation of early 60′s experimentation. The multi-part vocal melodies and acid-tinged minimalist guitar arrangements are well familiar to fans of the Meat Puppets, but without any of the southern fried flair. More interesting to me are the sections of the album that stretch beyond any existing psychedelic formula however. "While Everyone Was Waiting" sports a bouncing disco bassline at the front of the mix that is a little confusing for a reviewer that just spent three days trying to chew through the newest collection of Oh Sees sludge psych. Am I supposed to dance to this? Like....how?

Throughout Alone are surprising little approaches toward modern pop. From the Vampire Weekend-esque bounce of "Mas Doper (Love Me Probably)" to the spacey french pop jangle of "After Tonight", Talk in Tongues set themselves up as a brighter, happier (though no less trippy) alternative to the heavy psychedelia of San Francisco acts like Ty Segall and the aforementioned Oh Sees.

I'm beginning to realize that the key difference between a good psychedelic record and an awful one is doing everything in moderation. On Alone With A Friend, Talk In Tongues avoid dipping into the same reference well too often. They don't over-saturate the music with hazy production effects. There is just the right balance of darkness and light; human performance and artificial enhancement. When a group is able to walk that fine line well, we all get the pay off. This record isn't going to melt your face away from the skull, but it will tweak your brain just enough to leave room for dancing.