Psychic Ills - Dins

Genre rock Publisher The Social Registry External Links Official Psychic Ills MySpace Official The Social Registry Website

Any potential guilt resulting from reviewing Dins half a year after its release is assuaged when the writer recalls that his promotional copy of Psychic Ills' debut arrived some three months after said release date. When the Social Registry label is described in passing by bloggers and indie-culture sites alike as "tiny," that's rock-crit code for "my e-mailed entreaties were met with utter silence and (a) I was only able to review or refer to the work in question (Blood on the Wall, Gang Gang Dance, whatever) because it was up on Lime Wire, or (b) incredibly, long after I'd forgotten I was even interested, a promo CD turned up in my mailbox sans one-sheet." Enough of my whining, though; you've clicked, scrolled, and squinted in order to learn more about the Ills afflicting the psyches of this young Brooklynite foursome, and I'm dicking about, wasting everyone's precious daylight.

Like so many underground (and aboveground) rock explorers before them, Psychic Ills raid their dusty record collections and scavenge whatever spare parts they feel they can use to Frankenstein a mood potential fans - too young to know better and perhaps indifferent to a dusty, distant musical past - will accept as wholly original. One gets the impression that these songs are barely smaller than the room the band recorded them in, as every sound is compressed and sandwiched with every other sound, the exhalations of assorted sounds making things stuffy and close, making the walls sweat; similarly, every song soaks easily into the next: "East's," well, Eastern guitar scales continuing on into "Electric Life" before a shaking-sheepdog cluster of instrumental shimmer takes over, "Untitled" expanding this idea into some sort of foreboding, rotating-axis, fever-dream delirium nonsense. Later, they reference - though not in order - Sonic Youth, Spacemen 3, Neu!, and Radiohead's Thom Yorke (circa "I Might Be Wrong") in ways that don't accomplish much more than to remind you that, hey, there are so many great records you've got packed away in storage that are more deserving of your attention. That's gotta count for something, right? Right?