Phoenix

Transparency is not always the best policy. By naming themselves after an early incarnation of the Velvets, LA’s Warlocks are asking for trouble, especially when the opener of their second album proper, ‘Shake The Dope Out’, is halfway between latter day Lou and co and the sort of ‘Sweet Jane’ rewrite the Dandy Warhols might knock off of an afternoon. It’s also by far the best tune here.

Phoenix is in essence a distillation of three generations of hazy fantasia: The Doors, The VU, Paisley Undergrounders like Dream Syndicate and The Rain Parade and the bowlegged Mancunian strut of Happy Mondays, The Stone Roses etc.

They surely make a lush noise, but sound alone is not enough without songs, and this is where The Warlocks come a cropper. I’ve had an advance copy of this record for a couple of months now (it came out last autumn in the US), and each time I sat down to play the thing I always got mired in the shapeless psychedelic sludge that dominates the first half, particularly the aptly titled ‘Cosmic Letdown’.

The problem with such tunes is a lack of the kind of tension that characterised Spacemen 3, or the barely contained violence that always existed in the spaces between Cale, Reed, Morrison and Tucker (‘Isolation’ borrows the bass drum and tambourine pulse of ‘Venus In Furs’ but fails to make much of it). Cale once told me the VU practised those somnambulant drones for weeks and weeks on end. The Warlocks sound like they’ve discovered their hypnotic allure but not yet harnessed their potential.

All that said, the remainder of the album redeems it. ‘Red Rooster’ is a sneering bottleneck squall that reels drunk and mirror-shaded through Morrison’s LA night by way of Roger Corman’s The Trip; ‘Baby Blue’ is snake-hipped and snotty, with groovy Farfisa; ‘The Dope Feels Good’ is methedrine Dylan with a Mary Chain candy coating.
On balance though, I think the world will survive another few millennia without any more backwards tape loop suckage and open-ended guitar freakouts.