Drug Couple (aka Miles and Becca Robinson)’s new album Stoned Weekend is definitive proof that, in several parallel universes, “strawberry fields” are indeed “forever.” This album is an always weirdly melodic fun-house ride through a traveling exhibit of very imaginative diagnostic-test ink blots.
Yeah, this psych rock that touches odd electrical wires and does funny things to any willing cerebral cortex. And sometimes, Stoned Weekend wobbles with stretched logic of always fluid and sometimes cacophonous (and really cool) time. And you may have guessed it from the band’s moniker, but let’s just say this music takes us all back into the pages of a classic Wonderland childhood adventure book – in which our dear Alice gets such sage “advice from a caterpillar.”
So, it’s pretty much the real deal.
This adventure begins with the title track, a cosmic kaleidoscope where those “rocking-horse people” are still eating “marshmallow pies.” “Stoned Weekend” drifts in a euphoric haze, with a (sort of country) pedal-steel guitar riding shotgun on the West Coast psychedelic coach ride that aspires to live in some permanent now, and certainly wants to avoid Elvis Costello’s sarcastic message in “Welcome to the Working Week.”
There is always another “newspaper taxis waiting to take you away”: Drug Couple’s “Missed Our Chance” dives deeply into complex cerebral latitudes, with both Robinson voices swimming in the depths of psych rock that spirals into one heaven-sent fuzzy electric guitar solo. In some aspect, this is yet another melodic mess like the Rolling Stones’ “Tumbling Dice,” or to get more esoteric, the Pretty Things’ “Defecting Grey.”
Then, Becca and Miles trade lead vocals for “Lemon Trees,” a languid tune that plays host to even more pedal-steel guitar. The song registers with big marks on the “Eight Miles High” meter — with yet another absolutely cortex-tingling guitar solo. This echoes the sound (albeit on a different level of mental gravity) of the Civil Wars’ first brilliant album, or perhaps, that of the equally great Rattlin’ Bones by Kasey Chambers and Shane Nicholson. But ouch — “Linda’s Trip” gets peanut-butter heavy and has a tough and catchy chorus. This is popular music beamed into our brain from some distant solar system.
My friend Kilda Defnut says, “This music swirls with the beauty of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot – with all of its stormy anticyclonic and very mysterious melody.” And she also says (while getting a tad less astronomical in her discourse), “This music just tickles my brain in a really nice way.” Odd though: this music, with all its late ’60s psych pulse, remains strangely human. Drug Couple have just made a really nice rock record.
“Little Do I Know” slows the pace, and could (almost) be mistaken for a song from that first Dead Can Dance album. And there’s an unearthly guitar edge that flirts with deep magic. “Ben’s Bongo” is cosmic and very wonderful country rock, with dual vocals that collectively desire to visit, of all places, some Silver Dollar Saloon in the town of Deadwood, South Dakota, and that’s a long way from their home base in a “200-year-old barn (called Freelandia) in the Vermont woods,” which conjures what, in the hay day of those old rock ‘n’ roll days, was called “getting it together in the country.”
Ditto for “Blue Water.” This is a song that trots on a cowboy dance floor and then sails into a helium balloon epic of delinquent stardust. Becca Robinson begins the tune, and then Miles’ voice erupts with slow drama that recalls the weirdly wonderful ballad sound of early Mott the Hoople. Drug Couple’s Stoned Weekend offers that very same “you are one of us” cult-band invite. Big compliment, there.
The next two songs offer a nice juxtaposition. “Our December” is garage rock that inhales cosmic rock ‘n’ roll glue and re-invents the internal combustion engine of Detroit’s rock ‘n’ roll music. But then “Wyld Chyld” slows the excitement with a lovely Salvador Dali’s “Persistence of Time” clock-dripped vibe. Indeed, this is perhaps, just more advice from that Wonderland caterpillar.
And then, of course, the musical circle is completed with a refrain of the opening song, “Stoned Weekend.” Yeah, we still want to live in an eternal “now” — you know, Sunday night without that ironic welcome to any “working week.” Yeah (again!), this is indeed Mad Hatter music.
It’s certainly a throwback to the underground sounds of the late ’60s. But it’s a lovely gumbo that grooves with earthy salt, buzzes amid a smoky haze (legal in some states for recreational use!), and sends melodic smoke signals into the sweet, always blessed, and very warm welcoming cosmic heavens.
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