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Psychedelic Revolution
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Moon Cat
9577 posts

Edited Mar 01, 2012, 16:10
Re: Psychedelic Revolution
Mar 01, 2012, 16:01
I got back to Mancunia and thus my pod yesterday to find Psychedelic Revolution waiting for me. Which was nice.

I must admit, I can't remember, having read the various 'nays' & 'Yays' on this thread, having quite such a feeling of trepidation when playing a new Cope album. Only had a couple of spins so far so it's early days but more 'yay' than 'nay' from me thus far. Bit late to the party but here's my initial impressions...

Sonically and lyrically it seems to be a continuation of the Black Sheep album and Preaching Revolution/Unruly Imagination material. Nice to see Julian tapping into his gift for melody, even dabbling with folky-prog nuances on a couple of tracks. I think the whole thing is a bit more playful and toying with absurdity than the gun-on-the-sleeve and overall stance might initially imply. I keep coming back to Julian's referring to himself more than once in recentish interviews of having a cartoon quality and there seems to me to be elements of that here. Afterall, it's an album called "Psychedelic Revolution" which, to me, has connotations of the 'peacenik' and 'revolutionary' almost at odds and jostling for space with each other like Cope's earlier, hippyish stone-hugger persona (remember when he was "fluorescing"? Happier Times maybe?) is finding it increasingly hard to define himself in the fuck-up Kapitalist kaos we are currently enduring. The whole last few years would seem to have been something of a reactive-phase (big on phases is Julian) in terms of contemplating and reflecting the world morphing into a pro-active phase, or at least trying to find a pathway through it all and this album seems to be another aspect of this phase.

I need to live with it a bit longer, but so far, although some of the lyrics and imagery are a bit uncomfortable to me, it's not quite as "RAGH! KILL!" as I feared. And, thankfully, there is humour still there as well as some lovely, catchy music.

ps Mind you, a bit worried that one of the photos is captioned something like "Kat Killer salutes the dawn at Yatesbury". Sticking it to The Man is one thing, but what have fluffy moggies done? 8^(
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