Labels: Egghunt – Funny / Not Funny – Steady Sounds
Review by: Alex Deller
Most often when something comes at you pegged as ‘psychedelic’ you’re either gonna get boring stoner rock (perhaps with added fazer pedals) or milquetoast indie kids who’ve just discovered their parents’ Pink Floyd records. It’s a hard yard, particularly when what I tend to want is something sounding utterly deranged, drug-ravaged and brain-murdered. The Diamond Center do not achieve this by any stretch of the imagination, but to their credit they have delivered some fine psych-washed music that wasn’t quite what I was expecting. They drag their feet through seven bleary-eyed tracks of light-touch stuff that somehow, and in an extremely minimal way, checks in with Death And Vanilla, late 00s In The Red Records (Strange Boys, Oh Sees etc.), volume three of the Pebbles series and, probably, a couple of spaghetti western soundtracks. One track (‘Pony’) has a main refrain sounding like a chloroformed ‘You Really Got Me’, while another (‘Snow Silence’) has a whiff of Low about the ailing heartbeat drums and Nirvana Unplugged in the chorus. It’s lovely stuff, a bit polite perhaps, but easy to keep on repeat on those long nights when your brain feels like glue and sleep refuses to claim you.