Psilocybe – Strange Place Review

Have you ever thought about the concept of object permanence? In human development, this refers to the realization that something does not cease to exist when it is not being directly observed. But before babies reach that stage, it means that they perceive their world as a constant stream of being and nonbeing. Mom left the room? She’s gone forever. Blanket fell on the floor? The world is a cold dead place forever.

The point is twofold: first, babies are dumb. But second, we need each other. We need the reassurance of external reality. I haven’t listened to Pink Floyd’s The Wall in a long time, but I often get that haunting question on loop in my mind: is there anybody out there?

The roundabout way this connects to Strange Place, the debut full-length album from New Jersey’s Psilocybe is that music is often both the question and the answer to that same anti-solipsistic query. Musicians pursue their craft, in part, to see if it will resonate. Sure, there’s a lot of base survivalism involved, but it also seems fundamentally tied to a need – or at least curiosity – to connect. And for the listener, it’s the same in reverse. Just think of how you felt the first time you heard a piece of music (or saw a painting, or read a novel, or…) that expressed something you sensed deeply but had assumed no one else understood.

I don’t know if Psilocybe will make you feel this way, but the New Jersey trio’s thrilling, nearly unclassifiable heavy metal resonates on such a unique frequency for me that it offers assurance that none of us is truly alone.

Psilocybe has released three EPs since 2016, but the 10-song/42-minute Strange Place is their first full-length recording. The trio of Marcus Acosta (guitar/bass/backing vocals), Ishi Anais (lead vocals), and Marc Pappalardo (drums) pursues a restless, unchained, genre-agnostic musical exploration that includes elements of many touchstone references, yet the sum of those elements amounts to a fusion all their own.

If you really need one specific label on the band, the best I’ve been able to come up with is “progressive alt-metal,” but what that really equates to is an eagerly impatient brew of funk, groove metal, alt-metal, hip-hop, prog, thrash, death metal, and noise rock. Ishi Anais’s vocals are a big part of the album’s stylistic slipperiness. Her voice is massively charismatic but never showboating, moving from a coarse bark with a hip-hop cadence to a hushed croon, and from soaring wails to rubbery rhythms and oddball melodies. In this, she sometimes moves in a similar space as System of a Down’s Serj Tankian, Skunk Anansie’s Skin, or a significantly less hyperactive Mike Patton.

The opening track, “No Life Left on Mars,” layers melodic solos above thrashy galloping, snotty punk attitude, and progressive, funky grooves, followed by “La Sirena,” which puts puts Spanish lyrics up against a reggae-like backbone that morphs into a heavy chug and woozy chorus. Although the alt-metal styles of the US and UK are well-represented throughout Strange Place, Psilocybe often floats in a similar orbit to some of Europe’s more notably outre progressive metal bands such as Frantic Bleep, Trinacria, and especially Madder Mortem.

Although Psilocybe has only three members, Strange Place features a few guest spots on vocals and synth. This, coupled with the frequent use of multi-tracked guitar and vocal lines, gives the album a much larger presence than its standard personnel implies. On top of that, the album sounds wonderful, featuring a rich, well-rounded mastering job from Cult of Luna’s Magnus Lindberg. The tactile aspects of the production shine through beautifully on “Cryptic Ways/Dolores Dread,” which opens with a thick, twangy bass lead that later gives way to a punishing metallic breakbeat around two minutes in. The song’s acrobatic midsection flips from lunging, Arsis-like melodic tech death to staccato alt melodies like a riot grrrl System of a Down.

Psilocybe also presents plenty of moments of more psychedelic exploration, as on the slightly more straightforward “Thin Skin,” with its undercurrent of melancholy and blazing guitar solos, or especially on “Spectre,” a chiming, cosmic drift which is undergirded by nervy instrumentation and gradually building vocal strength. “Spectre” comes across a little bit like Tool’s “Eulogy” by way of the latest REZN album.

The nice thing about an album this multifaceted is that the listener will likely pick out and identify with the musical elements peculiar to her own history. If this means that some of you might hearken to Julie Christmas-led noise rock like Made Out of Babies while others of you might pick up on Psilocybe as a more metallic face of such notable recent hardcore acts as Turnstile, Soulglo, or Zulu, then that is exactly as it should be. If this also means that at least one other of you can almost hear Strange Place as if they were Skyclad magically transplanted into Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, then this particular knucklehead will also feel slightly less alone in the world.

The truth of the world is that objects are more permanent than people. The joy of music like Psilocybe’s Strange Place is that it makes us feel connected to a chain of being that stretches both backwards and forward, and that it makes us feel, therefore, eternal.

Posted by Dan Obstkrieg

Happily committed to the foolish pursuit of words about sounds. Not actually a dinosaur.

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