MOUNTAINS AND RAINBOWS - Particles 2LP

Highly recommended.

Black vinyl.

One of the great, unheralded Castle Face releases, it’s hard to consider the album as individual tracks so please don't take the single track provided below as definitive.

Detroit's Mountains and Rainbows has been around for more than a decade but with little more to show for it than a "dodgy-sounding" self-released cassette. That is, until John Dwyer of Thee Oh Sees saw the four-piece playing on a shared bill last and returned home raving about them.

Psych, garage, punk, new wave and 70s art-rock combine to magnificent, spirited (and sometimes borderline-shambolic) effect on this immense debut double-LP, recorded at a secluded Michigan lake house.

The songs blend together, not monotonously or statically, but with a meticulously reckless smashing. Each song strikes one another forcing tinier and finer divides like an astral phenomena we read about but never actually see. Sludgy, strung out Velvet Underground-esque track “Fancies” breaks the album up and clocks in at just over ten minutes. It’s anxious and uneasy and feels more like a band warmup where the instruments sound like vocals and the vocals are a series of warbled announcements.