Lo-Fi Love At The Park Cafe - Desibeli.net Review

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Modern psychedelic patchwork pop-rock is a difficult genre – it is not an easy task treading the thin line between pretentious and spurious. The multilayered cake of music easily results in a dry and contentless helping. How does one make that melting pot of genres really groove?


There lies a question only few can answer, but Roger Davies, a Scotsman better known as the band Pilgrim Speakeasy, has solved this dilemma ages ago. It has been nearly three years since the magnificent  ”A Ruff Guide to…” album, but Davies hasn’t been resting on his laurels. Work on the new record began already in 2011 and now the lengthy toil has resulted in a seventeen-track journey into musical Neverland.


This massive album is certainly overlong, it should be noted at the outset. Still, most of the time the train stays on the tracks as if bewitched. To Davies’ credit it must be said that he gets both the intricate folk numbers and the electro-rock boulders shooting out of their massive backgrounds to fit in the same picture. Everything on the album is bound together by a uniform soundscape, the extremities of which are kept effortlessly under control even if the Kraftwerk might transform into Jefferson Airplane at a moment’s notice. Black Sabbath’s old, rumbling Warpigs smoulders like red-hot iron as it stretches into a seven-minute-plus groove centre, and Egg Town buzzes like the deepest acid rock.

 
If richness in style and tone equals strength, Lo-fi Love at the Park Cafe is a real Hercules of rock. Many might feel steamrollered by its massiveness, but if divided into smaller portions and given the time it needs, it can be a great friend for 2014.