Psychic Graveyard

Simply checking the pedigrees (ex-Arab On Radar, Chinese Stars, Some Girls, Doomsday Student, and Hot Nerdz) will only get you so far with Psychic Graveyard. With a manic output of four full-length albums—Loud As Laughter, A Bluebird Vacation, Veins Feel Strange, and now the brilliant Wilting–in nearly as many years, Psychic Graveyard makes consistently thrilling and unsettled sonic artifacts for a world emptied out and flattened by a joyless and sociopathic mediascape. But some things do stay consistent across their ruptured anti-aesthetic: Charles Ovett’s relentless workflow on the drums; the burbling sawtooth substructures, grimy lead synths, and deconstructed guitars supplied by Nathan Joyner and Paul Vieira; and, of course, vocalist Eric Paul’s many narrators and personas, who find form as ghosts howling from within the machine or as agitated surrealists living lives huddled in the grimmest of redoubts. On the new LP Wilting, once again a product of geographic dispersion (Providence and San Diego), the band invites the listener to peel back the pedigrees and fall headlong into their twitchy waking dream. -John Rieder of Secret Fun Club