JUNE 2008 ONLINE EDITORIALS
The Varmints – Lucid Hallucination
By Nate Harper
Psychedelic rock only deserves its name when the fuzz and feedback are thick enough, convincing enough, that you feel like your brain is swimming in whiskey and madness, trapped inside your skull and trying to get out. When The Varmints are at their best, they channel this sort of freak-out intensity, the heavy Morrison-esque vocals breaking into an inhuman harpy’s shriek while the guitars dither and distort like lines along a mandala, hypnotizing the ear with their not quite concentric circles and geometric arabesques.
If not all emotion can be expressed with words, then The Varmints brand of psychedelia takes the listener to that extremely personal place where one feels at odds with all external physical reality, but in tune with the Self – a fancy way of saying that this is some great music to actively zone out to. Building on the more straight-ahead rock base of their previous release, Love Pony, their new material explores more sonic territory and also hits a bit harder as well, never venturing into anything meaner than Ozzy-era Black Sabbath, but still sounding comfortable rocking out as hard as anyone did while Nixon was in office.
One gets the feeling the garage these guys practice in doesn’t have posters for anything that came out after Jim Morrison died, but given their skill at and fervor for updating classic rock riffs with their own sound, it’s probably best to let these guys dodge the draft and keep on rocking like it’s 1972 again.