Then & Now by The Goslings

For fans of early Animal Collective, Sleep, Olivia Tremor Control, noise pop, and the harrowing abyss at the center of the psychedelic experience, Then & Now by The Goslings entombs its psych pop sensibilities in dense layers of distorted chaos. Slow, sludgy tempos pull us downward into a dark, staggering trance, all paired with distorted guitar and drum sounds to invoke a psychedelic take on the blues. At this point, the bright bubblegum forms of psych pop appear on the horizon, an absurd contrast whose implications sink in over the course of these chanting, cyclical instrumentals. The more we step back and examine those classic sounds of radio psychedelia we thought we knew so well, the more we notice the latent darkness sitting just below the surface. Now, the trip unmistakably turns bad, that philosophy of spiritual oneness filling us more with the dread of death than the joy of life.