Psychedelic Porn Crumpets: SHYGA! The Sunlight Mound

Psychedelic Porn Crumpets: SHYGA! The Sunlight Mound

It’s difficult to dig into a Psychedelic Porn Crumpets album without mentioning Tame Impala, Pond and King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard—the holy trinity of Australian psych-rock. But it’s also unfair to constantly play the name-drop game with this Aussie quintet. Like their 2019 breakout, And Now for the Whatchamacallit, the band’s fourth LP operates on its own bright, buzzy, manically joyful wavelength. The Crumpets, led by singer/guitarist Jack McEwan, still harness a boyish, rebellious energy: SHYGA! The Sunlight Mound sounds like what a guitar prodigy might cook up on a Saturday night between downing a 12-pack of Mountain Dew, knocking over some mailboxes with a baseball bat, chugging some cough syrup and spacing out to the Donnie Darko director’s cut. The song titles alone—“Sawtooth Monkfish,” “Pukebox,” “Mundungus”—showcase their spastic mischievousness, often reading like character and sketch names from lost episodes of Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! or The Eric Andre Show. And SHYGA, fittingly, plays out like one massive, disorienting sonic sugar rush—a snorted Pixie Stick that gets you high. The adrenaline kicks in with the perfectly titled “Tally[1]Ho,” a slice of warped glam-prog full of clattering drums, bent-note riffs and descending ear-worm vocal melodies. The frenzy never stops, with the hilariously needly hammer-ons and falsetto swoon of “Triplosaur,” the glorious harmonized leads and overwhelming fuzz of “The Terrors” and even the one moment of relative respite—the digitally glitched fingerpicking that concludes “The Tale of Gurney Gridman.” “Blink and you’ll miss it/ Everything’s existing,” McEwan sings on opener “Big Dijon.” Hey, he warned us!

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