The Mad Walls - Have You Heard the News? (LP)

Eight years since the breathtaking Somewhere Anywhere EP, The Mad Walls return to reignite psych rock with this gorgeous, floatily heavy, effortlessly groovy and sublimely sinuous debut LP.

Driven by bone shaking acoustic guitar, visceral drums, wonderfully trippy basslines and the throwaway perfection of Christopher Mercado's spooked vocals, Have You Heard the News? is pure rock 'n' roll yet devoid of cliché, informed by - but no way in hock to - early MC5, Skip Spence, Sonic Youth, Syd Barrett and Jefferson Airplane when they still all lived together. Recorded on tape in Mercado's garage, there's a DIY heart with epic results across 16 songs. Only one track clocks over three minutes, and some under 30 seconds.

"It's just chatter about life and human feelings. Stylized human expression" is Christopher's self effacing explanation of his mind bending, playful, storytelling. It opens with the walloping drum canter/bass attack of Who Wants to Die for Religion, passes through the furious distorted acoustic guitar solo on I Tell You How I Feel, the woozy, elastic time-stretching of Cool Tripper, the brief, funky lurch of In Your Dream You Are No One, the almost lush, cinematic Seven Days, which conjures Serge Gainsbourg by way of Moby Grape, Hip Comma's floaty strut and the groovy raga of Maka the Native, which has not one but two "breath solos." Clouds of Dust is a skeletal krautrock fragment and There Only Is a luminous psych-pop single. Final track Apples ends the album with a sinewy 12-bar blues and a killer psych guitar break. Bliss. Somehow The Mad Walls manage woozily florid and sharp as a blade. Studiedly detailed but effortless. Whip smart and dumb. And as we said at the start - just gorgeous...

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Tracklist:

1. Who Wants to Die for Religion
2. Have You Heard the News
3. I Tell You How I Feel
4. Cool Tripper
5. In Your Dreams You Are No One
6. Seven Days
7. Hip Comma
8. Maka the Native
9. Television
10. Electric Parade
11. Clouds of Dust
12. There Only Is
13. LA Gloss
14. Before the Sun Meets the Day
15. Till the Next Time
16. Apples