Psychic Ills
Mirror Eye
(The Social Registry, 2009)

It seems a bit damning to call a band or a particular record “difficult,” but there’s no way around the fact that Psychic Ills ain’t easy. If a rock/pop sense of craft and song structure are what you value most, then you’ll likely find Psychic Ills—especially this, the New York ensemble’s second full-length record—bordering on impenetrable. Mirror Eye, however, is strong for what it is, and will hit the spot nicely if your tastes extend into the darker domains of drone and free jazz. Does Black Dice or Gang Gang Dance ring a positively connoted bell? You oughta dig in, then! Their first full-length, Dins, came out nearly three years ago, and in the time that’s passed since then, Psychic Ills’ sound has morphed into something that’s a bit more forbidding than before: Where tracks like “January Rain” and “I Knew My Name” off Dins were relatively straight-ahead psych-rock tracks, there is little like that on Mirror Eye, a shadowy, throbbing, mostly improvised set of cerebral, tribal-feelin’ jams.

The first track is “Mantis”, a nearly 11-minute space-thrum with a hypnotic, looping bassline and guitars distorted so as to sound like they’re part of a wild sitar raga. Follow-up “Meta” is probably the weakest on the album—a repetitive guitar figure and heavily phased, ululating vocals end up not really adding up to anything as compelling as the other tracks here—but those who’ve powered through the opening track are probably willing to float through it into the more interesting territory ahead. Once the deep, jungle-esque bass pulses of “Eyes Closed” kick in behind the jam’s erratic clicking rhythm, the album picks up considerably. Its drugged-out pace and bizarre synths feel like a deconstructed version of what Massive Attack used to hammer out—a momentary feeling of vintage trip-hop, but not so much as to feel nostalgic… Psychic Ills look inexorably ahead, only taking time to look back about two-thirds of the way through the album with “Fingernail Tea”, the most welcoming of the jams present here. It opens with trippy séance-worthy drums and a tremolo-d guitar riff, layered over with echo-fied male vocals that wouldn’t be out of place on a ’60s psych record (or Dins, for that matter). What comes to mind here are Sonic Boom’s holy, heaven-bound jams with both Spectrum and Spacemen 3. Similarly inviting is “The Way Of”, which takes on a more Eastern flavor and a tight groove of hand drums and bass guitar that coalesce into a peaceful-feeling, nirvana-like whole.

The sleeve art for Mirror Eye features a blurred photo of two feminine-looking arms playing a tambourine—a fuzzy document of an inspired moment, not unlike Mirror Eye itself. Although not every track here hits hard, it is for the most part a pretty terrific portrayal of Psychic Ills’ potential to lift the listener into a space that, while sometimes uncomfortable, is consistently mesmerizing.

Listen: Various Tracks [at myspace.com]

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