Who the hell are these guys? I didn’t know when I bought this record, and I still don’t really know now. They’re based in Fleetwood in Lancashire, but that’s about as far as my knowledge extends. Under normal circumstances, I doubt that the album’s title or cover art would really have grabbed my attention. It sort of looks like a 2nd division metalcore album (that font), or else some angsty post-Isis kind of thing. Not my bag, man.

But, a few words in the Norman Records write-up piqued my interest, and a 30 second streaming clip later, the LP was on the way. Two days later I'm holding probably the best bit of proper psychedelia to have emerged from the UK in recent memory, wondering WHO? WHY? WHAT? WHERE?, the general feel of the music within laying a million miles away from the tableau of chilly industrial gloom implied by the cover. Sprawling, maximalist, potent and mysterious, Earthling Society quite unexpectedly veer closer to the webs of gold-leaf gossamer obscuring the entrance way to some subterranean opium den housing a breakaway sect of the Golden Dawn than they do to a bracing morning walk through England’s industrial heartlands. Needless to say, I ken dig it.

Opening with tamboura, tablas and a bit of gentle guitar meandering, opener ‘Aiwass’ gradually builds into venerable psyche-drone monster, multi-layered fuzz guitar skree, pounding toms and knob-twisting electronic distortion building into a rich fog of menacing black mass ambience to rival Belgium’s legendary Sylvester Anfang II, even as a distant, high-pitched vocal chant evokes a open-skied grandeur and sense of momentum rarely encountered in the work of those particular basement-dwellers.

Building on this more fresh-air inclined sensibility, ‘Tortuga’ opens with heavily chorused electric finger-picking, mysterioso reverbed vocals and a rubbery, Floyd-ish groove, as intermittently decipherable lyrics speak of spectral piratical adventures on the Spanish Main. A whole other variety of beautiful, distinctly British psychedelia is in evidence here, taking us back to the glory days of Flying Saucer Attack, and to my mind pretty much surpassing anything they ever did; an astonishingly evocative track, suggesting aerial views of glassy, Ballardian landscapes fading into an ultra-verbed storm of amp howl as the rhythm section ebbs and flows like the tides and the studio’s much-abused Space Echo starts giving off clouds of black smoke.

Amazing as it is though, all this is merely a build-up though for the album’s real centrepiece: a bold cover of one of my all-time favourite pieces of music, Alice Coltrane’s ‘Journey in Satchidananda’. Instant sale for me right there, pretty much. Therein, Cecil McBee’s indelible bass line is dutifully recreated and Pharaoh Sanders’ initial soaring sax riff is picked out on shrieking, overdriven guitar, whilst an electric tamboura stands in for Alice and thick blankets of heavy fuzz and apocalyptic, dive-bombing feedback cover all else. Further florid written appraisal seems surplus to requirements really, so let's just say if you think an endeavour like that wasn’t going to crack my annual Top 5, you clearly don’t know my music tastes very well. Total bliss.

Not sure how to conclude really, except to cattily suggest that if Goat’s much-talked up communal jamming sensibilities were half of what they’re cracked up to be, they might be, perhaps, say, one third as certifiably awesome as these glorious and learned Northern gentlemen – current wielders of the finest fuzz & astral incense on these shores, or I’m a dutchman.

Listen and buy from Riot Season, or visit Earthling Society here.

Labels: best of 2014, Earthling Society