Kev Denny - Freaks and Geeks

6.5

Among the more exotic offerings piling up in the inbox, this three-track EP of Scottish origin has suddenly emerged, seemingly intent on plundering every source crystallised in the academic glossary of psych rock. Kev Denny is a musician from Glasgow who, much like a character from Drew Pritchard’s Salvage Hunters, salvages used or abandoned musical instruments and recording equipment, repairs them and puts them to use in creating new music (or so his biography explicitly states). With three albums already under his belt (during which he has even found himself collaborating with none other than Audrey Tait, drummer for Franz Ferdinand), he now releases a brief showcase of the possibilities offered by his (presumably) latest finds, delivering a lesson in psychedelia that is as textbook as it is equally disorienting — and therefore effective.

Nothing particularly far-fetched here: Earthquackes Below When My City Freaks is, quite transparently, a revival of 1960s psychedelia, complete with the usual references to blues and funk, for which one could easily throw hundreds of names into the mix. First Slave Riot Hits The Pyramid 7000BC (the sheer length of the titles themselves is an unmistakable flirtation with that historical horizon) is cloaked in tribal and Eastern rhythms and accents, presumably to evoke the historical setting conjured up by the song's title. With Luna Freaks and Forever Geeks, we practically enter a Kaleidoscope-like dimension, edging towards space rock, with endless reverberations spreading out into the ether.Freaks and Geeks is pretty much all this: a sketch-like work that reimagines long-buried sounds in a contemporary key, sounds that today seem to have been relegated almost exclusively to the underground.