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Psychic Ills deserve more listeners. The New York quartet’s second album Mirror Eye is a smooth blend of heady psychedelia, Eastern-tinged raga dub, minimal Kraut electronics, and improvisational synthesized space rock that congeals into one 30-minute head trek. You get loops, Spacemen 3 “sitar” music, phased clatters, Sun City Girls-style instrumentals, and undulating hand drums, all played through a hallucinatory haze. It’s hard to get a sense of the places Mirror Eye takes you after listening to a single cut — because, as mentioned above, the eight tracks work together to propel the listener deeper into Psychic Ills’ project — but here’s the opening track “Mantis” to get you started on the journey.

Mirror Eye is out 1/20 via The Social Registry. You can hear more of it at the band’s MySpace. If you’re looking for more “song-based” works, check out “Fingernail Tea.”

[Photo by Blossom Berkofsky]

Psychic Ills | AllMusic
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Comments (4)
  1. d@ve  |   Posted on Jan 16th, 2009

    pfft

  2. Mike  |   Posted on Jan 16th, 2009

    Last year, some sound guy at SXSW gave them a hard time, and they responded by playing what was surely the most sinister set of the whole festival. I thought the bad vibes were going to materialize into giant hands and wring that dork’s neck. I am really looking forward to this album.

  3. Rip Van Bore Winkle  |   Posted on Jan 17th, 2009

    zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

  4. I’m digging this sound – it’s like what lal meri and School of Seven Bells have going with the world psych vibe, but a bit more, erm, expansive.

    Sadly, since most of the iNteRnEt CoMmUNiTy can’t take the time to learn to splel rihgt, I can’t imagine many people having the attention span to sit through anything rolling past the three minute mark… too bad, these guys are rockin’ it. Or raga’in it. Or whatever.

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