Psyche Tongues

Every time I hear these delightful International Coffee flavored assholes Psyche Tongue I get transported to a magical kingdom where everyone is wearing those odd shaped raver/goth backpacks that look like some sort of black colored spiky fruit. I just want to tear my shirt off and roller blade around the finance district with a bull horn shouting out random slogans that sound revolutionary but are a result of randomly selecting words out of a bag.

Psyche Tongues makes music that makes going inward feel like being at an exclusive party filled with nothing but mind altering drugs, Lake Bell and dogs with Michael Bloomberg masks. Sure it's trippy but when your whole body feels like it is getting a handy who gives a flying Fuck bro?

Check their bandcamp and soak in that shit, the water is perfect. - SYFFAL

Psyche Tongues sound as though they have taken everything I love about music (hollow body guitars that manage to sound as heavy as they are beautiful, swirling spindles of sound that rise and fall like the tides of some distant planet, vocals that manage to be upfront in the mix yet somehow sewn into the background and drums that feel like they could bandy you all about the space time continuum for their fucking own amusement) and poured them all into a dirty hillbilly bathtub allowing it to ferment into the kind of 'shine that not only knocks you on you keyster but alters your DNA.

Listening to their amazing new EP Flavour Canyon feels like being sent into the desert with a belly full of acid and nothing but a gunny sack full of the aforementioned libation to quench your palpable thirst. It can be disorienting at times, occasionally frightening, you might have to strip down to your tight whites and that Mexican shaman keeps looking at you funny; but by the end you are an enlightened being and 15 pounds lighter.

Everything about Flavour Canyon paints my toes chartreuse with a hint of sparkles bro. The Oscar Acosta, brown power meets Fear and Loathing vibe of "Pulsar Halo" turns me into the lunatic who slam danced at the elks lodge. If there was any song on this album I would want to break windows to it would be "Eat Yer Maker". "Soul and Body's" sensitive biker gang vibe makes my grundle not only shake but also rattle and roll. Whenever I listen to "Plans" it makes me think of people who constantly look panicked but once you get to know them you realize it is just their at rest face, I know that is a weird thing to think about but I can't help it. I find it as amusing as I find "Plans". Finally there is "Shake Like Death" which is the crossroads between the moment in the above mentioned acid trip when you realize just how perfect the world is and the scene in Temple of Doom when the high priest rips the heart out of dudes chest. Essentially it is perfect and so is Flavour Canyon. Psyche Tongue delivers five tracks of pure amazing, I suggest you grab this fucker, get some supplies and head out to the unknown bro.

You won't regret it. - SYFFAL

Psyche Tongues’ orange slice of psych-pop confection is a tightly planned astral daytrip. “Eat Yer Maker”’s relentless snare and gamboling bassline set the scene for an expedition to Titan’s shores, and the call-and-response chorus of “Soul and Body” recalls certain mutants. “Shake Like Death” is a slowly unfolding, acoustic-picked hymn suitable for summer worship of our local yellow dwarf. None of these tunes clocks in past four minutes, making for a concise and all-too-brief sunburst of citrine space-taste. Juicy! - Weird Canada

To my knowledge (ie. YouTube’s) there are a total of two clips of live Psyche Tongues footage on the internet. One is thirty seconds of them playing in what appears to be the kitchen of a small apartment. Seeing as how there are five members in Psyche Tongues, it is incredibly cramped. The band is gleefully cranking out something that sounds a lot like The Velvet Underground’s “Sister Ray”, the few visible people that I guess you could call “the crowd” are super into it, and it’s the most fun footage of a band I’ve seen in a long time. The other clip features them playing “Pulsar // Halo” – the leadoff track of their new EP Flavour Canyon – in a venue not much bigger than that kitchen, and they have that same energy plus an ecstatic tambourine player who is having a better time than you or I will ever know.

Besides making me really want to catch the next Psyche Tongues show, it tells you something about them that the music on Flavour Canyon re-affirms: this is a group with a genuinely infectious sense of wide-eyed discovery to them. And seeing as how this is a group of guys that actually go so far as to call themselves a “psychedelic rock band” – a pretty boldly goofy thing to go telling people in the year 2013 – that’s important.

So many indie rock bands chase the neo-psychedelic Nuggets garage-rock template, and so few of them do anything with it besides aim to trigger that exact recognitory response in whatever nerd happens to have stumbled upon their shitty tape. Like any highly stylized and accessibly timeless aesthetic, it’s very easy to superficially duplicate, and thusly, when a band lands in that kind of sonic ballpark, I imagine it’s fairly easy to think that what you’ve made is good because it feels and sounds enough like something else that is good. And obviously, those are pretty different accomplishments. However, this is exactly why Flavour Canyon succeeds where so many like-minded bands go limp. They’re clearly enamored with late-sixties freak-rock, but they don’t allow it to be a limitation.

Songs like “Eat Yer Maker” and “Pulsar // Halo” have an ambitious immediacy to them that is truer in spirit to Psyche Tongues’ forefathers than most of their peers while simultaneously managing to avoid sounding like they’re trying that hard to sound like anybody but themselves. It’s easy to forget how rare it is to come across music that conveys a genuine sense of sincere enthusiasm, but Psyche Tongues are the kind of band that reminds you. Roll on down to Flavour Canyon, it’s a trip worth taking, man.

Flavour Canyon is available on Bandcamp.

Top Tracks: “Pulsar // Halo”, “Eat Yer Maker”

Rating: Strong Hoot (Good) - Grayowl Point

I am not sure what I like more about Psyche Tongues; the fact that their music sounds like an ethnic version of White Denim or that whenever I listen to these shitbirds I feel like I am in one of those movies that take place in one night in some non-descript city where a group of friends go out for a fun night and all hell breaks loose. It is like eating a handful of speed, having a dead hooker's blood on your jorts and trying to outrun her angry pimp who happens to be a former Navy Seal. Through all the madness you are just trying to drop a digit in the cute but sassy clerk at your dry cleaners. Psyche Tongues is so fucking awesome bro.

http://www.syffal.com/psychic-tongues-turtle-giants%20 - SYFFAL

60’s psychedelia, Nancy Sinatra, and a megaphone.

Sounds like: Make’s you want to do a little wa-wa-watusi. - Alan Cross

Psyche Tongues are making their way with ‘Plans‘. It’s psych rock set in outer space to the beat of a different drummer. This is what you listen to at 2 am, whether you’re winding down or winding up, this is what you put on. This is what you download and put on repeat a million times over. Do download, enjoy, repeat. - Dingus

Embracing a psych-garage sensibility infused with a blues/country-esque feel, Psyche Tongues are on their own cosmic journey. This four-piece channels a healthy dose of the late 60’s and turns it into something uniquely their own, combining dynamic energy, edgy guitar riffs, gritty vocals and melodic harmonies straddling both twangy garage-rock and hazy psych-tinged ballads. Giving a nod the past without being overly retro, Psyche Tongues definitely shows a lot of promise. - Lonely Vagabond

Another find of the Lonely Vagabond. These guys are from Toronto and play the occasional gig at The Drake. Nuggets, anyone? - Alan Cross