Okay, so some background is definitely needed to clear up the nomenclature here, before we get into the nitty-gritty.

Back in Tokyo in the early 1980s, bassist Nanjo Asahito and guitarist Munehiro Narita formed the incredibly influential maximalist heavy rock trio High Rise (you can read me waxing lyrical about their recently reissued second album here). One of High Rise’s early songs was named ‘Psychedelic Speed Freaks’, and the late Hideo Ikeezumi subsequently adopted this as the name for his even more influential record label – generally shortened to P.S.F. – which proceeded to release High Rise’s music, alongside that of many other incomparably influential acts in the fields of psychedelic rock, jazz/improv and uncategorisible weirdness, culminating, eventually, in the release of a double CD compilation entitled ‘P.S.F.: Psychedelic Speed Freaks’, assembled as a tribute to Ikeezumi following his untimely passing in 2017. (I wrote about this compilation here, and it has subsequently been reissued on quadruple vinyl(!), also via Black Editions.)

High Rise, meanwhile, split up in the late ‘80s, reportedly due to Narita’s decision to give up music in order to spend more time with his family. Maximalist guitar nuts such as myself however now have cause to REJOICE, as, unexpectedly, 2019 finds the great man returning once again to the world of recorded sound, perhaps inspired by the attention the aforementioned Black Editions label has recently been lavishing upon the P.S.F. catalogue.

Now apparently based in the USA, Narita has teamed up with – and I quote – “a pair of untamed L.A. acid punks” and, displaying a nigh-on herculean lack of originally, he has named his new band Psychedelic Speed Freaks, prominently displaying the P, S and F initials on the cover of their self-produced debut album, which is also named ‘Psychedelic Speed Freaks’.

Got all that clear? Good, because otherwise the resulting confusion could tend to obscure the fact that ‘Psychedelic Speed Freaks’, the 2019 debut album by the band Psychedelic Speed Freaks, is fucking brilliant.

Though essentially offering a direct continuation of High Rise’s blueprint of over-saturated Blue Cheer –> ‘Raw Power’ -> Motorhead lineage rock n’ roll, Narita flies free here from the intimidating ‘thunder-bass’ and blackened production aesthetic imposed by Asahito, and, clearly in command of the faders, he’s got his guitar mixed at what I would personally deem about the right level (and anyone who has ever been fool enough to take my advice on such matters knows what that means).

Whilst new collaborators “Jasso” (bass/vox) and “TJ” (drums) lay down the necessary bare bones of some reassuringly sloppy stoner-punk thud somewhere down the hall, Narita is right up in our face, alchemising their grue into sizzling liquid gold, with his unique approach to lead playing – a heavily fuzz-wahed yet precisely lyrical wipe-out in which individual picked notes are subsumed into a single, wildly fluctuating sine wave of giddy, shrieking energy, bypassing flesh and wood as if ripped straight from some twitching, malfunctioning synapse plugged directly into a speaker-stack – sounding even more aggressive and well-honed than it did back in the ‘80s, if such is possible.

On the tunes on the A side, Narita spends at least some of his time playing chords, falling back into the kind of familiar, proto-Mudhoney riff patterns that characterised High Rise’s material on ‘Lawless’ and ‘End Your Worries’. By the time we get to the B side though, he’s completely off the leash, leaving the bass to hold down the structure as he hits the high end of the neck and solos his way into the stratosphere.

The result is, needless to say, one of the most exhilaratingly extreme rock albums of the modern era, sitting comfortably next to the MC5-meets-AMT carnage of Feral Ohms debut from a couple of years back, even as tracks like ‘Night Seer’ – my personal favourite here - dial things back to a sleek, pulsing urban beauty that nigh on defies description, recalling the exquisitely nuanced blare of Martin Weaver’s work in Wicked Lady, whilst closing track ‘Immaterialized’ finds Narita grinding the gears of a shining, ectoplasmic hog for an eternal run down the post-earth highway, ol’ Jasso’s voice breaking into a Lemmy-like croak as space-rock oblivion beckons. It’s a monster.

Fuzz guitar fanatics who value raw sound, inventive playing and sonic extremity over expensive, brightly coloured boxes and multi-tracked compression - or indeed, unrehabilitated rock fans who just want an excuse to grind their drunken heads into the ground like some kind of human corkscrew - both need to get on this immediately.

---

Bandcamp link.

Label link.

Still available from Norman in the UK!

Labels: album reviews, PSF, Psychedelic Speed Freaks