‘come on let’s go’ by broadcast

I FIRST HEARD the English group Broadcast in a parking lot, probably in the summer of ’99, or around that time. I remember exactly which parking lot it was. It was the one beside the Presbyterian church in Setauket on Long Island. The song was “Phantom,” off of 1997’s Work and Non Work. I think after that, I fired up the old Napster, and Broadcast’s discography was mine. Even at that time, the internet was nascent and information was scarce and hard to find. I really had no idea what Broadcast was, who was in it. The band was shrouded in mystery.

Since then, there have been some advances in internetting. Thanks to Wikipedia, I know in a flash that the group was formed by Trish Keenan and James Cargill, a bassist (!) in Birmingham in 1995. From what I understand, Keenan and Cargill were a sort of scene super-duo (reminiscent of the Gane-Sadier partnership in Stereolab). I think context is a little important here. There was a 1960s revival going on in the late 1990s (think peak Britpop). This wasn’t just driven by nostalgia. People, including myself, just happened to like music from that time. Why shouldn’t we be able to write our own songs inspired by the music we liked? It raised questions about time and cultural ownership. The bottom line was that no matter the inspiration, what came out sounded different. There was no way to recreate that sound, but a sense of loss infused the music. You can hear this in Belle and Sebastian’s recordings.

In March 2000, Broadcast issued their first proper album, The Noise Made by People, on Warp Records. “Come On Let’s Go” was the second single off the record, released that May. Songwriting credits are attributed to Cargill, Keenan, as well as band members Roj Stevens (keyboards), Tim Felton (guitar), and Steve Perkins (drums). The song received positive reviews, with journalists reaching for familiar words like shimmer psychedelic pop. For a young person, there were haunting lines in the song. “It’s hard to tell who’s real in here, come on, let’s go.” It sounded like spending time with strangers. It sounded like a long, lonely walk home at 2 am.

Broadcast was burned to disc and was my music accompaniment throughout college. Once, while I was walking past the radio station at George Washington University, I heard the Broadcast song “City in Progress” being played over the speakers. There was a young DJ inside, an Asian American girl (I will not speculate if she was Korean or Japanese, etc.) but she seemed so introverted and unassuming, and I was surprised that she too had heard of Broadcast. Of course, I waved at her through the glass. “I love Broadcast,” I mouthed to her. “Me too!” she mouthed back. I later got my friends suspended from their show on the radio, when I was invited on and accidentally said, “fuck you” in response to the hosts’ provocation.

The manager came rushing in, sweating, cursing too. “I’m going to get fined for that!”

Trish Keenan died in 2011, when I was knee-deep in diapers, basically (my three daughters were born in ’03, ’07, and ’11). She contracted pneumonia while touring Australia. Swine flu. She was only 42 years old. Cargill oversaw the release of the remainder of the Broadcast catalogue in 2024. Spell Blanket and Distant Call covered demos recorded between 2000 and 2009. And that was that. There’s no Broadcast without Trish Keenan. I’m not sure what the other band members are up to now. But maybe some of us might try to make songs that sound as good. Pretty please?

mill:liminal by murmer

*Into the mill. Mill:liminal is the audio accompaniment to the 2018 film The Mill, recorded at the Räpina Paper Factory in Estonia.*

MILL:LIMINAL IS NOT AN EASY RECORD to peg, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t interesting or enjoyable. In fact, it’s among the more haunting, thought-provoking, and meditative recordings I have heard in some time. Released this year by Murmer, the handle of sound artist Patrick Tubin McGinley, it is the sonic accompaniment to a 35-minute film made with Daniel Edward Allen in 2018 called The Mill. To record The Mill, McGinley and Allen descended on the Räpina Paberivabrik, a paper mill in southeast Estonia that has been producing paper continuously since the 1730s. Here, the old mill’s creaks, whirs, rattles and hums are arranged into drone-like compositions distilled into seven, hypnotic tracks. McGinley reports that he was inspired to record the mill after having been a customer. Räpina produced the packaging for earlier releases, and he was drawn in by its mesmeric sounds.

McGinley’s approach to recording is very cinema verite. His sound recorders are the shaky hand holding the camera, giving you a first-person look — or in this case, listen — at what’s happening. The sounds for mill:liminal were recorded mostly with a Sennheisier MKH 30/40 boomed microphone rig connected to an SD744T hard disc portable field recorder. Additional sounds were recorded with self-constructed contact microphones and some with DPA 4060 miniature omnidirectional microphones. So what can sound like sound captured raw is actually the product of some serious technological sophistication and deep processing.

The result is unsettling, for mill:liminal sounds like consciousness melting off the slate of time. In some moments, the low and steady growl of the paper mill machinery takes on monastic tones, as if a monastery of Tibetan monks were assembled for prayer in the mountains.

It’s not hard to find parallels in McGinley’s work, but it does lead one to unexpected places. Is a man in a plaid shirt with a microphone in hand, poised to capture sounds in the field, not unlike Alan Lomax, with his field recordings of world music? McGinley does agree with that.

“I have long-standing thoughts about the world of field recording and experimental music being considered as folk music,” he says. “It’s music that has grown out of a community outside of academic circles, a sort of voice of a population.” Interestingly, he has noted that the mill, in its own way, is a living entity, as people play limited roles in maintaining its processes.

There are also sonic links to the experiments of minimalist composer La Monte Young and his Dream Syndicate. One can see how the hum of a paper mill aligns with Young’s tunings that matched the environmental sounds around him, most famously his reliance on a refrigerator’s 60-cycle electrical hum, which he considered as a foundational drone for his music. Young called the 60-cycle hum the “drone of Western civilization,” but as mill:liminal reminds us, these folk songs of machinery are all around us. If listened to, they can be a thing of beauty.

mill:liminal is available now as a digital download and will be available soon as a cd packaged in paper from the Räpina Paberivabrik. In addition to undertaking field recordings of creepy paper mills, Murmer also produces a regular weekly radio show called Framework Radio. Other recordings are available on Bandcamp.

algún día by tomás del real

“ALGÚN DÍA” by Chilean singer songwriter Tomás del Real is easily one of his most accessible and enjoyable songs. Instantly satisfying, the lead single off his forthcoming album Jakobsoni, is three-and-a-half minutes long and finds del Real expressing all his strengths: gentle, playful melodies, deft guitar work, and that almost half-whispered conversational singing style of his, as if he was confiding in you his most important feelings and thoughts on a walk at night.

The image of the typewriter in the video for the single evokes the literary tradition in pop music and is apt. Think of stories about Bob Dylan and The Band’s The Basement Tapes, where the lyrics were composed line by line on a typewriter in the house they shared, or even The Beatles’ “Paperback Writer” or “Eleanor Rigby.” While sounding almost nothing like McCartney, it could be said that del Real has similar sentiments, a fondness for novelistic writing, atmospherics that make a song glow at its edges, finding inspiration in the everyday.

Though the song glides along as easily as a ghost, del Real said that it even challenged him to play it. “It has this very complex fingerpicking that I heard in my head at first, but couldn’t figure out,” he says. “It took months for it to become natural.” The lyrics also emerged over time and the whole composition came together during a week of self-imposed exile in Berlin.

“I was able to take a break and finish up four of the songs on the new album,” del Real recalls.

“Algún día” reflects on existential themes of life and death, the temporary and timeless.

Algún día de erosión / Nuestras almas se evaporarán / Al encontrar otra forma en vez de despertar / Quizá, me han de contar

Which translates in English to something like

One day, through erosion / Our souls will evaporate / Finding another way instead of waking / Perhaps, they will tell me.

Finding another way instead of waking;

“I think time and the ephemerality of things is a topic that’s on my mind quite often,” he says. “I was searching for the most vulnerable aspects of myself while writing this song, the real spots, for something valuable.”

The single was recorded in Viljandi, Estonia, where del Real has lived for the past few years and produced with Javier Barría, who added the synths and other instrumentation. “Algún día” was mixed and mastered by del Real’s long-time collaborator Jorge Fortune in Chile. It is available on all streaming platforms, including Spotify, as of 31 July. The new album Jakobsoni will follow soon. It will be the fourth record del Real has put out in Estonia, following 2022’s collaboration with Lee Taul Don’t Chase the Lizard, 2023’s Principios de Declaración and 2024’s Notas Rotas. Despite this prolific output, del Real says that he battles writer’s block all the time, even with “Algún día”.

“This one has been like cold brew,” he says. “Drip by drip. It took a while, but it came out right.”

childhood

IN JUNE 1970, Led Zeppelin played their only concert ever in Iceland. Most of the country was on strike, but at the last moment enough volunteers were found to have the show, which was held at the Laugardalshöll, a venue that hosted handball events. Their set list included “Heartbreaker” and “Dazed and Confused.” They only spent 24 hours in the land of the midnight sun, but letters and paternity suits followed. “Dear Robert,” an Icelander named Sigríður allegedly wrote Plant. “Maybe you would like to meet your son, Snorri Robertsson.”

I found an old magazine about the show at Laugardalshöll in 1970 at an antique shop on Austurstræti and brought it with me to the music studio where Björk was recording her new album. She had been suffering from writer’s block (or singer’s block?) and had been in a funk for many weeks. But seeing the black-and-white photos of Led Zeppelin’s stay in Iceland piqued her curiosity and she sat there in silence in the studio’s lounge, paging through the magazine. “Look, there,” she said, pointing out a man with a shaggy beard in a loose shirt. “It’s my mother’s old boyfriend, Sigurður Guðmundursson! You know, I forgot all about that guy.”

These grainy memories of the old days helped to take her mind off the recording process. Soon Björk was jotting down lyrics onto a notepad and holding my hand. “I got a new idea,” she said. The sweetest moment was when she noticed, in a tiny photo, a small girl with dark hair being led by the hand across the tarmac to where Led Zeppelin’s plane had landed. She was not yet five years old when this had happened and had no recollection of having been there. “This is so magnificent,” she said, staring at the photo. “You just gave me my childhood back.”

‘twilight haze’ by fuzzolini

FUZZOLINI’S NEW RECORD is called Beauty Exists in Everyone. I’ve seen this group perform a few times, and both times they were so loud, I thought I was about to go into cardiac arrest. Which is what makes listening to an actual recording, where I can control the volume, so refreshing. “Ah, so that’s what it’s supposed to sound like.” I wouldn’t blame them for the sonic dissonance. One aspect is that’s how rock clubs do it. It’s supposed to be loud. And I also think the group is going for the wall-of-sound effect. On the song “Twilight Haze” they manage to create that same kind of full noise tapestry without suffering from too much messy distortion.

I’m kind of impressed by Fuzzolini’s guitarist, singer and frontman (I guess you could call him that) Valter Nõmm, who looks like he fell asleep in about 1997 or so and just woke up in the forest somewhere, still wearing the same flannel shirt. He has maintained that kind of sensibility, as if he’s still listening to Soundgarden on his Walkman with his sunglasses on.

He’s not afraid of big, crunchy guitar sounds, but these bold strokes are applied sensitively, with the finesse of an artist. According to Nõmm, “Twilight Haze” was one of those songs that came out of nowhere. “Come out of nowhere” songs are mystical. Think of “Get Back,” which Paul McCartney conjured out of nothing. Better yet, nobody is quite sure of where they come from. They just come. Getting a few words out of this tight-lipped cat Nõmm is always an effort. He is a man who speaks in gestures and prefers to let his guitar do the talking. But he did manage to tell me that the song “was created spontaneously in the studio,” in one take.

The original track was just his guitar and drums, played by Lauri Pajos. Later Margus Voolpriit’s bass and Kristi Jõeste’s synths were added to the mix. “I decide to go for something cosmic,” Jõeste says. ” I started to feel a little bit like Sven Grünberg.” The synths give the track its “beamed in from space” feel. The vocals are performed by Mari-Liis Rebane, an audiovisual artist and producer, who sings with Fuzzolini. This too was improvised, which preserved its “raw emotion and exploratory style,” in her words. Rebane and Nõmm have known each other for 20 years and had collaborated before, but Fuzzolini gave them the opportunity to do more. She sings on several songs, including “Balloons,” for which she created the synth sequence.

“Twilight Haze” was the second track they recorded for the record. It seems they’re happy with it. “It carries within it the fluid feeling of moving through the night,” says Rebane. “I like it’s hypnotic quality,” Nõmm agrees. Cosmic synths, heavy guitars, smart vocals, big drums. What’s not to like?

Photos by Nicolas Bouvy

‘i guess i’m falling in love’ by the velvet underground

EVENTUALLY ONE ENCOUNTERS the Velvet Underground. They are the godfathers of punk, the remakers of rock, the anti-Beatles, or something along those lines. Much has been written about them, much has been attributed to them. In reality, they were a creative New York rock group that enjoyed limited commercial success in the late 1960s. They are probably best known as Andy Warhol’s house band, and the Velvets toured to support something called the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, a multimedia experience, for lack of a better term, that included loud rock and roll. These events included film showings, light shows, and noise experiments. The Velvets played one of these EPI shows at a venue called The Gymnasium on East 71st Street in New York on April 30, 1967, during which their set was recorded. This has to be some of the best rock of its era captured on tape and the standout is “I Guess I’m Falling in Love.”

Authorship of this song is attributed to the whole band, which at that time included Lou Reed (guitar, vocals), Sterling Morrison (guitar), John Cale (bass), and Maureen Tucker (drums). I’m guessing that it was the scholarly Morrison who ripped the amazingly fluid guitar solo, which sounds fantastic with The Gymnasium’s acoustics. This live version later surfaced on the Velvet’s boxed set, Peel Slowly and See, which yours truly acquired as a teenager. I honestly was contending with the winter doldrums when I was in my Velvets phase, and probably some hormonal stuff, I think I was having periods of mania followed by collapse and depression. High school started early too, and I believe I suffered from sleep deprivation, which happens when you wake up at 6 am every day. And which made this the perfect band to listen to. While they have their dark mood music, “I Guess I’m Falling in Love” was a rare splash of sunshine.

Yes, even Lou Reed had his up moments. Otherwise, it was mostly down. There were tensions with Nico (“You’re out of the band!”). There were tensions with Cale (“You are also out of the band!”). And there were tensions with Warhol (“You’re not the boss of me!”). There was just a lot of Lou-related tension and probably the greatest tension he had was with himself (hint, his future involved a lot more heroin and some transexuals). But he was from Long Island — Freeport, to be exact — and as a moody teenager I could relate to his desire to blow the whole place to smithereens with some infectious rock and roll and set it ablaze with the help of Morrison, Cale, and Tucker. Especially Cale seemed dangerous, with his greasy dark hair and undertaker’s countenance. A few people have told me that I look like this brooding Welshman, which I take as the greatest compliment. Before forming the Velvets, Reed was a songsmith for a record company called Pickwick Records, by the way, where he imitated a lot of bestselling 60s pop and produced knockoff hits. A little Ronettes over here, some Beach Boys there, an inverted Four Seasons progression to serve as the foundation. One can appreciate Lou Reed’s taste for memorable changes, propulsive rhythm, and great hooks on this recording from ’67.

lost stones

WHEN I MOVED out of the apartment, I discovered the extent of my hoarding over the years. No matter how many boxes of books I moved, no matter how many armfuls of coats and shirts I extracted, the task was endless. I worked day and night and still got nowhere with the thing.

The apartment was in some up-and-coming residential area in Tallinn, like Noblessner maybe, but farther inland, though no place is very far inland in Tallinn. I had outgrown the neighborhood though, it being taken over by hipsters 20 years my junior with tech jobs.

While doing the move, I stopped and helped myself to some refreshing water flavored with effervescent mint at a café bar in the building’s food court. Some kid in a flannel shirt called me an old man for sitting there. ‘Next you’re going to start talking about the Eighties,’ he said.

Outside, I paused in the courtyard to breathe beneath the palatial, intergalactic, honeycomb looking apartment terraces and balconies, made of brick, glass and iron. And that’s when I heard it, the unmistakable sound of the early Stones. The fuzz of the guitar, that stark beat.

But something was strange about this song, for I had never heard it before. It was a bit like ‘Tell Me’ crossed with ‘The Last Time.’ How could it be that I had never heard it? Surely it had popped up in some anthology. But no. Looking up at the brick work, I could see the band, projected high in black and white. Mick Jagger was up there singing, holding the microphone.

Then it occurred to me. This must have been one of Brian’s songs. Andrew Loog Oldham had said that Brian Jones had written a few songs that Jagger and Richards, the primary songwriting team, had snubbed. By Oldham’s telling, Jones’s output had been worthless junk. But girlfriend Linda Lawrence recalled otherwise. She said that Brian’s songs were brilliant.

This must have been one of those lost songs, leaked from the vaults at last, played by Tallinn hipsters from some upper floor pad in the digital future. They were still cool. I was old and in the way, but the Stones were young. Mr. Brian Jones, 57 years dead, still lived on, his music played and played. Some consolation it was to hear the Rolling Stones on that sad day.

‘canto oscuro’ by araukaaria

Araukaaria on stage. Photo by Kerttu Kruusla.

ONE THING that has always impressed me about resident Viljandi Argentine musician José Manuel Prieto Garay, better known as Pepi, is his sincerity. It can be disarming at first, it can even make you a little suspicious, put you on guard. For how could a modern person be so sincere? At what point does such sincerity become an act? But his façade of sincerity is so durable and resilient that no matter what you throw at it, it just won’t stick. There’s no winking at the camera here, no hidden double meanings, no metamodernism. Everything is what it is.

This is sort of how I approach the new song by his group Araukaaria, too. “Canto Oscuro” is disarmingly sincere. It has a cinematic quality to it — it would make a good backing track to a montage about a religious pilgrimage. Considering the story behind it — the loss of Pepi’s father, a trip to Palestine — that’s not far off the mark. Pepi recounts a roadtrip between Chile and Argentina before his father passed away years ago in telling the story. His father was very ill at that time, and could barely make the trip. This song, “Canto Oscuro” (Dark Chant) is kind of like the soundtrack to that trip composed after the fact. It passes along like a mountain road at night.

Shadowy, lofty, winding, introspective.

“I think it was clear from the beginning of the song that it was some kind of lament or requiem,” says Pepi of the song. “I wanted to visualise the journey I lived with the music and lyrics.”

Supposedly it takes about 16 hours to drive from Santiago to Buenos Aires. “Canto Oscuro” is only about six minutes long, but it feels like it could be 16 hours long. There’s enough packed in, a flute motif by Rauno Vaher at its opening, atmospheric guitar playing by Viljandi virtuoso Norbert de Varenne, backing vocals by his sister María Julia Prieto Garay and keyboardist Lisanna Kuningas, and solid contributions by Fedor Bezrukov on bass and Johannes Eriste on drums, the rhythm section of an earlier incarnation of Araukaaria. Araukaaria is one of those bands like Nine Inch Nails, that revolve around a principal songwriter and musician, but that have a revolving cast of characters, some of whom return after various scrapes and adventures (Rauno Vaher was the original drummer, and the last time I saw them, he was back on drums).

“I like to work with different people and in particular here in Estonia most of the musicians are involved in three or four projects which makes it hard to schedule and coordinate,” says Pepi. “As the project is quite a live band project, having different people always brings a new flavor.”

One of these players is Lee Taul, also of Don’t Chase the Lizard, Black Bread Gone Mad, and the Songs and Stories from Ruhnu Island project, who provides epic sweep with her violin. And another is — surprise, surprise — Tomás del Real, another Viljandi Latin American musician, this time from Chile, who helps out on something called the charango, a “small Andean stringed instrument of the lute family,” as Wikipedia informs me. He hadn’t played it in years, he says. But here it is, filling out “Canto Oscuro,” fusing Estonian and Latin elements.

“One day I was working on some other stuff and Pepi rang me up and asked, ‘Do you have time today to help me with something? I need you to record a charango in two hours,” recalls del Real. “I hadn’t played in a while but I went over there and we locked in the studio for a little bit and I made what I could,” he says. “I knew that the song was important to him and that Chile in a way plays a part, this connection between his life here and there, so I guess I was one of the pieces he needed for that track.”

As a person who also lives a life bridging continents, I know that sentiment well. At times, in the air between Europe and the Americas, I have often thought of myself as pulling thread with a needle, trying to sew two lives, one here, one there, together. It’s this sense of disorientation, of displacement that lurks in the obscured background of “Canto Oscuro.”

It is felt, even if not expressed.

“Pepi has an ability to put images in music that the listener can understand without even understanding the lyrics,” says Kuningas. “A lot of his lyrics are very visual, and he is able to put these pictures in your mind.”

Most of the song was recorded in one live take, though a few elements — the backing vocals, the charango, classical guitar — were added later. Martin Mänd of Kopi Luwak recorded “Canto Oscuro.” It was mixed and mastered by Mattias Pärt. Animation to accompany the video was created by Pepi’s sister Camila. Pepi decided to release it on February 12, his father’s birthday. “This song is connected directly to my life, my story,” he says. “It’s a snapshot of that period of my life and has helped me to heal and to let go of a very big emotional burden.”

wormslayer by kula shaker

SOMEHOW KULA SHAKER‘s new record Wormslayer crossed my desk. I was skeptical. I’ve never known what to think of this band. I was a fan in their heyday, the so-called classic period, way back at the end of the 1990s. It was good background music, driving music, with memorable melodies and interesting lyrics. But then they sort of faded away. There were new albums, but they just didn’t find their way into my heart. The original organ player Jay Darlington left the band and it felt like their best days were behind them. But a few years ago he returned and so Kula Shaker has been reborn. Wormslayer is the second album the reassembled outfit has put out and it sure is tasty and entertaining. Badly needed groove music, especially in such unstable days, psychedelia joined with elements of Indian classical music, English folk, Britpop, and even a little Manchester baggy (just listen to “Good Money“).

As I understand it, it was singer and guitarist Crispian Mills’ aim to bring more positive energy into the world with this album. Lost son Darlington helps him to achieve this noble goal, along with bassist Alonza Bevan and drummer Paul Winter-Hart. My favorite track is “Charge of the Light Brigade.” The production is thick, dense, yet shimmering, lively. The sound comes up at you from every angle. The drums are tight, the bass is flawless, and the organ holds everything together in a warm glow. Mills is also an underappreciated guitarist. According to Mills, it’s the best sound the band has ever achieved on record. Here I have to nod along and say, I agree.

An Estonian version of this review appeared in the magazine Edasi in March 2026.

‘charge of the light brigade’ by kula shaker

SOMEHOW, SOMEWAY this track crossed my desk and ears. I’ve never really known what to make of Kula Shaker. I think I heard their cover of “Hush” here and there when it came out way back when, and I had a promo copy of 1999’s Peasants, Pigs, and Astronauts that was in heavy rotation in my car when I was about 20 years old. These were the Britpop days, and Kula Shaker is an unmistakeably British band, with their raga influences about as ubiquitous as a curry shop in East London. So in a way, they are eternally linked to Oasis and Blur, even if they sound nothing like them. They arose during a creative, memorable period in British music.

Those were also the grim Radiohead days, the “Karma Police” days. For me, Peasants, Pigs, and Astronauts was a reprieve from all that seriousness and foreboding. It’s linked in my mind with the first Austin Powers film, and I do think some fembots make an appearance in the “Mystical Machine Gun” video. They were a fun band and the lyrics were just a part of the vibe. That’s nice that guitarist and singer Crispian Mills had something spiritual to say, but after could he please play that tasty guitar part again? In a way, they were a nice follow-on to Primal Scream in the “Rocks” era. Badly needed groove music penetrating the merciless Yorkean gloom.

My understanding is that Crispian caught some flak for being what we would call a nepo baby because his mother was in The Parent Trap (and I am old enough to have seen the original without having to look it up). For me, this only helped sell the band more. What better fate for the son of Hayley Mills than to become a psychedelic bard? While his name recalled Henry V’s speech at Agincourt, the rest of the band — Jay Darlington (organ), Alonza Bevan (bass), and Paul Winter-Hart (percussion) sounded like characters from an Evelyn Waugh novel. There was very little not to like about this group, and yet they remained a cultural outlier.

Which brings me to this track, “Charge of the Light Brigade,” the third on their new album Wormslayer, released at the end of January. The production is thick, dense, yet shimmering, lively. The sound comes up at you from every angle. According to the band, the whole album — which sounds like a D&D character, but is a spiritual reference to conquering negative energy — was recorded on two-inch tape. They laid this song down “Street Fighting Man” style, with just acoustic guitar and drums at first, with bleed over between both, the rest added later.

The changes are addictive and insistent and the lyrics are a shade darker. “They were all drinking blood in the shadows / drinking your blood and draining away / don’t turn your back on the shadows” and “they’re breaking the law / these masters of war / they come from behind / they don’t knock at the door.”

“The Charge of the Light Brigade was a famous 19th Century poem referring to a famous British military blunder during the Crimean War,” said Crispian Mills of his inspiration. “However, I morphed the meaning of lyrics to make it about rallying the ‘poets of light’, in a hopeless but valiant charge against the forces of darkness.”

This ain’t, “You’re a wizard in a blizzard of mystical machine gun.” This is serious ’26-level stuff. As noted, the band sounds great. The drums are spare, the bass is buoyant, flawless. The organ holds everything together in a warm glow. Mills is an underappreciated guitar player, too. Naturally, the video is recorded in an old castle or church of some kind, maybe that one on the cover of Temples’ Sun Structures. Maybe all the psychedelic cats hang out there these days?

Some friends are not yet sold on the Kula Shaker renaissance. They are skeptical of the band’s output. But with a song like this, it’s just impossible to argue that it’s not good, because it is. It’s just a good song. The best part is this: there is no self-indulgent solo. This song’s tight. Three minutes and five seconds and they’ve said what they’ve come to say and they’re done.