Psyched out

I took a little while to warm to it, but Hey Colossus' Dances/Curses has barely left the stereo since my copy arrived in the post. I always find track-by-track breakdowns of records by their creators fascinating reading, and this one - a guided tour of a beast of a double album in the company of Paul Sykes and Chris Summerlin - is no exception.

Particularly interesting are Summerlin's comments on the overall sonic philosophy of the record: "I can only speak for myself here but it feels like there was an unconscious decision made somewhere along the line to try and avoid any aural 'signifiers' of what you might call 'psych' music, if you like talking genres (which I don't). ... I feel like if anything even slightly started straying into that 'cosmic' territory it was canned on the spot." The results, he suggests, are songs that have "those same transformative qualities associated with psychedelic music but using a language that is economical and earth-bound" - which is as good a description as I've read yet of Dances/Curses' distinctively muscular and lean yet transportive and nuanced sound.