The monkey has been meaning to write about Pleasurewood’s brand new Electric Telepathy LP for a while but, as usual with the autumn release schedule, trying to get stuff done as the new releases inundate your virtual doormat is like trying to fill a glass with water as a tsunami hits you. Nevertheless, sufficient time has finally been found to scribe a few words on the second album from Suffolk-based outfit comprising of Paul Elliott and Dan Smith and the follow-up to ’23’s debut LP They Live. On the new one, the pair venture into the atmospheric worlds of psych-funk and vintage librry music drawing, as they do so, on such wide-ranging influences as vintage Indian cinema soundtracks (RAMMM), mod-grooves (the Hammond-led Chump Change), West Coast psychedelia via 90s-era Beck on Mojave Desert. Elsewhere the likes of enigmatic late night noodle of Good Falcon and the guitar-solo-drenched pitchfork venture into downtempo country while the antsy but skeletal (with occasional fuzz guitar interludes) Hoverfly would go down a treat at a b-boy convention and closer It’s so Easy conjures the retro synth-sound of Delia Derbyshire making out with Beck (again) and a yacht rock guitar solo. “Send us back a postcard from wherever Pleasurewood’s Electric Telepathy takes you” says the PR blah. Ok – well – you’ll need more than one postcard for that since it takes you from multifarious times and places across the planet as well as, at times, off-planet. Electric Telepathy then, an absolute pleasure(wood) to get lost in – no doubt facilitated, were you to cop it on wax, by watching the appropriately-marbled pink and purple vinyl spinning hypnotically.
(Out now on Farfalla Records)
