Silvermouse’s Earthadelik album

Oozing out of the speakers with a hesitant guitar’s melody buried under a plate of bass-heavy noise, we find “Dream Valley” situated in the dead-center of Silvermouse’s Earthadelik album just waiting for us to consume its rare sonic indulgences. Outfitted with as much texture as it is tonality, “Dream Valley” is, in more ways than one, a great sampling of what listeners can count on finding throughout Earthadelik’s ten-song tracklist, most of which sees Silvermouse taking a shift towards the audiologically exotic. It’s easily one of the strongest instrumental LPs I’ve heard in a long time, and that’s saying a lot considering just how great a decade the 2010s have been for the style.

“New Moon,” “Down,” “Freaks and Lovers” and “Beef in D Minor” are all pretty rhythmic and designed to put as much stock into their beats as they do their eccentric harmonies, while in the case of “Existence Experience,” “Spores in My Dermis” and “Dream Valley,” Silvermouse tend to favor more of a dynamically provocative approach that puts the girth of a melody ahead of everything else in the mix. The balance between the two sets of tracks is both contrasting and affectionately unique to the psychedelic model, which is yet another thing that’s been hard to come by in 2019.

BANDCAMP: https://silvermouse.bandcamp.com/album/earthadelik

There’s a lot of physicality flowing through the veins of “Little Ratty,” “Hot Button Wild Boom” and “Venus Feels Like That,” but I wouldn’t say that any of these songs qualify as being so meaty that they verge on being overwhelming. I can only assume that Silvermouse must have taken a lot of time to perfect some of the finer details here, because if they didn’t, they certainly caught a lucky streak that afforded them not only enough room to make a progressive and uncompromisingly robust record, but also one that could appeal to the club-goer as much as it does the musical intellectual like myself.

Fans of experimental music, psychedelia, electronica and groove-oriented avant-gardism can’t afford to miss Earthadelik this December, as it is perhaps among the best LPs of its kind to debut in the year 2019. This isn’t the first stellar album that Silvermouse has turned in, nor does it seem like it will be their last, but both loyal listeners and relative newcomers to their sound would be doing themselves a grave disservice if they were to skip over its tracklist right now. Earthadelik is a darkly embracive record, and one of my favorites out at the moment.

Mindy McCall