Playlouder - Music is the Network

Look out kids! There’s a new scene in town, and its called Shitgaze. Centred around a small college town in Ohio, a state known for producing some of the finest cracked and skewed indie rock, it’s actually better than its dubious title suggests. Built from a discarded fragment of narcotic influenced 60s psych rock, but punked up and combined with the experimentalism and ambient textures of the nebulous 90s genres Lo-Fi and Shoegaze, with the more successful bands also having a killer instinct for the disaffected 2 minute pop song.

Following on from excellent former label mates Times New Viking (now signed to indie-label par-excellence Matador), Psychedelic Horseshit are the latest band from Columbus to emerge bleary-eyed into the wider world consciousness. Recently spotted on these shores supporting Yeasayer, (and announcing that the funky new-agers were coming on to “kill the vibe” after their set), they’ve been polarising audiences with their ramshackle sets of shambolic atonal clattering, cynical defiant lyricism, and bursts of whitenoisewhiteheat greatness.

The 7inch begins with a stumbling 58 second dub intro. For these guys, the awkward pause, the other guy not coming in time, and the extra drum beat out of place are all part of the sound. Its titled “Dub Gaze”, perhaps a wry comment on how the press has seized upon the term they came up with (shitgaze) as an easy and unthinking way to label a disparate scene, or perhaps they were just stoned and thought it was a pretty funny title. Next comes hit single New Wave Hippies, taken from the album ‘Magic Flowers Now’, out on lo-fi veteran label Siltbreeze. It’s a witty, cynical take on the freak-folk movement- “Living in mostly cities / Talking with eyes closed/ Never trouble”,  “recovering 90s ravers and people who bought the wrong zines / its like a new disease!” This is over a heavy casio drone, tinny distorted drum machine and assorted screeching blips and beeps, and it makes a great single.

The other tracks are a slack as hell “5am” version of the track Portals, complete with out of tune guitar and signature crap keyboards through distortion pedal effects, and a fuzzed out strum called Silent Speed that recalls the Olivia Tremor Control if they’d been about The Fall and amphetamines rather than the Beatles and psychedelics. Last up is Magick Defends Itself Pt.3, an ambient textured drone notable mostly for the use of magick spelt with a “k” in the title, a practise for whatever reason becoming more and more popular in contemporary music. Whether these guys can last the duration or will become a tiny footnote in incredibly brief musical scene history (skunk rock anyone?) they're a lot more exciting than the self-absorbed nostalgia of the trad. shoegaze band I saw last week (no, not MBV), and thats enough for me.