Coconut's debut album is the cold, visceral guitar squall music that gives you infrared visions of No New York, of the Lower East Side as a cement-walled coffin. The Manhattan-based, Australian born duo of Tim Evans and Jordan Redaelli, together with drummer Daniel Mitha, conjure some of the darkest, most distant psych music we've heard, period.
Daniel Lopatin wrote the bulk of their press release, and you can't beat this propaganda:
Coconuts, as I have known them, cracking bunk PAs in NYC hovels, is simply inertia; steam-propelled on the hot guts of rock's past. They mainline into a legacy of pop obfuscation, in which sheer sonics and the sensuality of the guitar-as-tractor-beam blinds any sort of lyrical message or rock narrative. Their first record however, is a microscopic view of a band putting all the elements together to reveal something more subdued, more melodic. The sound is dire and low and vaguely menacing, like the pulse of an opiated Ritchie Valens slow dancing the the Dead C or the saucer-eyed paens of Japanese mopers The Jacks. And though the 'Nuts are lauded for their no-mind electric antic, their craft reveals a collective instinct honed over countless late nights of bleary deep listenings. This is a great psych record for all-time.
Especially loving that glorious Dead C racket. The destruction on these tracks (see: “Silver Lights”) is the kind of flawlessly knotted guitar psych that form quadrilaterals under your eyelids and rattle basement ceilings, and the sub-three minute pop charmer “When She Smiles” signals the 90-degree turn towards balladry the band's capable of, but let's stick with the meat on these bones with “Dark World”.
Coconuts self-titled record is out March 9 on No Quarter.
