Psychic Ills
Issue #30
Early Violence (Social Registry)
By Sheba White
Published: December 1st, 2006 | 12:00am
One of many migrating bands now working out of Brooklyn, Psychic Ills issued their critically acclaimed album Din in the early part of 2006, causing chronic Sonic Youth–sters to proclaim the quartet the next best psychedelic rock thing and to drop Spaceman 3 and My Bloody Valentine comparisons like so many hits of acid.
With Early Violence, a compilation of Psychic Ills’ first two EPs, Mental Violence I and Mental Violence II, the band comes across as less drug-induced coma than early-goth seizure via Bauhaus and the Damned. They recall the minor hints of Galaxie 500 in the needling guitars and the fuzzed-out bliss of Joy Division in the threatening beats.
Admittedly, it’s hard to listen to tracks like “Vice,” “Killer,” and “4AM,” with their staged spooky-vibe neuroses, and not hear the ministrations of all of these earlier psychedelic and goth rock heroes. The music is as familiar as an old leather jacket with the requisite spray-painted allegiances: the guitars grind in the right places, and the vocals are sufficiently smothered by reverb. Even the surfer-tinged rhythm of “Days” is an expected diversion from the vampiric melodrama of goth revisionists gone psychobilly.
Aside from being a nostalgia album, Early Violence could do with a lot less derivative wankery and a lot more stylization. Too much space is given to creating atmospheric doodlings and not enough to creating solid song structures that burst with new life beyond derivative chords. The result is that these early songs could go on forever, much like comparisons to previous psychedelic rock pioneers.
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