Erol Alkan and Richard Norris’ Beyond the Wizard’s Sleeve project presaged the modern psych-rock explosion with their EPs of fuzzy, warm edits of glammy psych-outs.
Their time warp excursions felt (and still feel) like loopy trips to a Carnaby Street club that never switched formats just got weirder and weirder over time.
Temples , out of Kettering, UK, are cut from this cloth.
Their debut album “Sun Structures“ came out early last year and ended up being Rough Trade’s Record of the Year for 2014.
It’s a notable feat considering the number of fantastic records came out last year. And it is a real stunner.
Perhaps unfortunately, references to Tame Impala are essentially inevitable for a band that traffics in such heady, kaleidoscopic sounds.
But one could and should just as readily be referencing The Flaming Lips, Kula Shaker and/or Strawberry Alarm Clock, as this sound isn’t new or old, but rather part of a continuum.
And that continuum has just gone interstellar like McConaughey, as Beyond the Wizard’s Sleeve have taken the full length album “Sun Structures“ and RE-Structured it.
The result is, as The Guardian’s Alexis Petridis put it, “more intriguing and original than the original album.”
Alkan and Norris have taken the weirdness just one step futher, to exactly the place it needs to be. Also, they’ve mixed it so that (on the vinyl format) the A and B sides brilliantly don’t break the tracks into single tracks, for a fluidity of sound that meta-replicates the experience of listening to an album from start to finish.
Heady, indeed.
Regardless, “Sun Restructured” is way worth hunting down, as it is a gloriously wavy trip.