It can be hard to find psychedelic rock bands that are worthy of the name. Usually, if you want to find something that is going to flip your wig, you're better off looking to artists that are genre-agnostic, or at least those who have embraced some inspired recombination of known forms into unanticipated shapes, like Fire-Toolz, whose crosssection of death/black metal and home-shopping network jazz is nothing if not transportive. King Gizzard is a pretty reliable source of electric and imaginative freakouts as well, but they're also pretty popular, and if you're reading this blog, I'd be shocked if you weren't at least tangentially aware of what the Lizard Wizard is up to.
One rock band who is deserving of the lysergic label and who you may not be familiar with is though, are the friendly East-Coast spacemonauts Skyjelly. Starting out as a solo project sometime prior to the release of their 2010 album Motorola Monkey, the group currently consists of Dave Melanson, Eric (Jones) Hudson, and Scott Sheik Levesque. Their sound is pretty hard to describe, even though it slots quite securely into the tradition of that noisy stratum of '90s-esque phylum of psych that draws as equally from the quieter, cloudier parts of Flaming Lips and Brian Jonestown's catalogs. They're a Northern-Eastern band with a cool Southern heat, a quizzical sensibility concerning the blues, an impeccable sense for mood and duration, and a poetic sense of dream logic.
It's a little hard to get a handle on Skyjelly's whole discography, but you don't have to hear everything they've ever released to understand what they're all about. In fact, they have one album that kind of lays out their whole aesthetic in one nice tidy package- well ok, maybe not tidey... and it's not actually one album, its two; 2016's Blank Panthers / Priest, Expert, or Wizard. Skyjelly are pretty good at experimenting and they have some early releases that lean a little more into triphop, and some later efforts that sound almost like dreampop, but their central conceit is that the blues and rock 'n roll don't have to be driving to take you places- sometimes what matters most is the steadiness of the approach.
While most rock bands rely on repetition to ground their themes and draw out the essence of a song's emotive core, Skyjelly take this necessary reliance on structure and thoroughly abstracts it. What the band introduces you to, is not just reliant on grooves and rhythms, but more specifically, loops- short sonic motifs whose cyclical design emphasizes a kind of uncanny motion. Like a film, strip skipping in a projector, but where you would expect to see (or rather hear) the same scene play out, again and again, at nausea, you instead get a subtle thread of variations - shade of scènes à faire are emphasized or dialed back, change hew, or are muted so that by the end of a three-minute runtime, you're not even sure how things mutated to reach its final form as the process is so subtle. All you know is that you're miles away from the place where you begin your journey with the band.
While Blank Panthers / Priest, Expert, or Wizard is definitely more reliant on cleaner and tidier beats and forward pop guitar melodies than some of their other works, but it's still oddly transportive and extremely easy to lose yourself in. This is due not only to the album's somewhat daunting length but also the patience with which the Skyjelly approaches each of these songs- allowing them to resolve in a natural and unforced way, permitting each to demonstrate unique and evolving tendencies in their own naive and peculiar way. With every track on this album, I feel like I'm witnessing some kind of baffling, yet charming creature hatch from an oversized, technicolor egg. You might not think that you'd be able to make a fast, personal connection with an extraterrestrial being, but when one uses the egg tooth at the end of a tubular proboscis to crack the casing of its ovular chamber and then looks at you like it needs a mother, you might just change your mind. As tortured as this metaphor is, that's kind of what I feel like is going on here- I'm learning how to befriend something that is not of this world
Skyjelly are about as cozy, comforting, and abnormally convivial as this side of psychedelic rock can get, and if you're not going to welcome Blank Panthers / Priest, Expert, or Wizard into your life, then you're going to be missing out an unorthodox and wonderful kind of companionship.
