Starting with bright, jangly guitar and weird filter effects, Frankie and The Witch Fingers‘ 2017 album, Brain Telephone, plunges you straight into their weird, wonderful world of psychedelic garage rock with the opening title track and barely lets up on the rabbit hole plunge for the album’s entire length.
The harmonica on “Learnings of the Light” brings early Rolling Stones to mind, if the Stones got even trippier in their first decade. The heavy fuzz of “Primitive Delight” is perfect for rolling down the windows and blasting it as you pull into the Tasty Freeze drive-thru for a strawberry milkshake and some onion rings. “Sunshine Earthquake” and “Microscope” have a neat “soaring” energy to them that seems to lift both tracks, and you, off the ground.
“Doomed” embraces the band’s love of The Doors and southern California (where the band relocated after starting in Bloomington, Indiana) rock. “Sinister Poison” has a fun, slightly spooky keyboard riff throughout that it might make it your new favorite addition to your Halloween playlists. “Owsley” takes Beatles-era psychedelia and injects it with about a liter of straight fuzz and cosmic rock riffs. I’m not sure if the guitars or the drums are bigger in it.
You might think “Let Love Be Love” is going to be a full-blown “hippy” track with its title and opening guitar strums and ballad vocals from Dylan Sizemore, but the track doesn’t devolve into navel-gazing jams and instead remains a straight-up Summer of Love pop-rock cut. They save the epic jamming for “Mother’s Mirror,” which is over eight minutes of ripping solos, tight chops, and warped vocals. It starts as a mind-trip jam (with flute!) and slowly builds into a fast blast through space.
It’s a cool album because you can hear the band’s sound evolving into what would become their harder-edged garage rock face-melting style.
Keep your mind open.
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