PREMIÈRE: Aunt Dracula - Speckled Hawk

Single review by kev@thesoundofconfusion.co.uk

The warped, twisted, contorted psychedelia that we heard from Philadelphia's Aunt Dracula with the première of video 'Timecoat' in August was a shock to the system, and one that will have got neurons in your brain firing that had up until that point been redundant. The messed-up mind that invented these sounds belongs to Scott Daly, and Aunt Dracula began with the recording of the album 'Face Peel' in 2008, a record that was released on Bandcamp with a vinyl release planned for next year. As mentioned before, a remix album entitled 'Peel Face' should be appearing on the horizon at some point. If your mind has yet to recover from 'Timecoat', then this new video will either repair it, or sent it past the point of no return.

The trippy, colourful, scatterbrained visuals are in a similar vein, and I guess you could say the music is, but only in the respect that it's equally as psychotically psychedelic. Much shorter in length, 'Speckled Hawk' is a bit like the part at the end of Pink Floyd's 'Bike' where Syd Barrett just introduces a load of odd noises and clockwork sounds, but here it has a gentle melody from what we're told is a ukulele, a kalimba and an autoharp, along with an African tongue drum and other samples mixed with granular synthesis underpinning it. This creates a dreamy vibe in the truest sense of the word, as in it's confusing and quite unlike reality, just like real dreams. There are vocals too, different kinds of vocals treated in different ways. Whether this is one man's voice that's been filtered through many different things is difficult to tell. In fact with the whole song it's difficult to be certain of anything other than the fact that this is a wonderful, new and genuine type of psychedelia and it probably shouldn't be played to anyone in a fragile state of mind.



Aunt Dracula's website





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