The Lickets: Round the Red Lamp
International Corporation

Mitch Greer and Rachel Smith return with a new collection of Lickets material, a noteworthy part of the forty-five-minute release its “name your price” download designation. Yep, this one's available for free, so anyone heretofore unfamiliar with the experimental-minded duo's particular breed of shamanism has no reason to wait any longer. Operating out of their Berkeley, California home base and active as a duo since 1999 (double-bassist and vocalist Lena Buell joined them for a brief spell in 2009), multi-instrumentalists Greer and Smith present once again an exercise in fanciful wonderment rooted in psychedelia and pastoral folk.

Though seven titles are indexed, Round the Red Lamp really plays like a connecting suite that evolves through related though easily differentiable scenes. The title track opens the set with a pastoral appetizer of vibes-and-acoustic guitars placidity, after which “Driven from Home” weds the kind of plodding drum pattern one might hear in a Native drum circle to an organ drone and warbling synthesizer textures, the result a trademark example of trippy, Lickets-styled psychedelia.

An unexpected turn arrives in “Marvels of Modern Science” when a pulsating synthesizer patterns's joined by an organ riff that'll probably have Santana's “Black Magic Woman” welling up from some listeners' hazy corners of memory. As the nine-minute piece advances, however, the association's quickly left behind when the material, all organs, vibraphones, acoustic guitars, and synthesizers, swells into a psychotropic riff on Riley-styled minimalism. Despite its title and suitably macabre tone, the synth-drenched “Do the Dead Return” plays like an instrumental mini-soundtrack to a dark and disturbing sci-fi sequence, while the closing “The Country of the Blind” makes good on its H. G. Wells title nod with eight minutes of pulsating sun-dazzle.

January 2019