Haight Ashbury

Rössli - die Bar der Reitschule - Bern:
www.roessli.be

HAIGHT-ASHBURY’s reputation for being a 'folky' band will be put to rest with ‘Haight Ashbury 2:The Ashburys’.

One of the first bands Scott got into was the Jesus and Mary Chain, and you can definitely hear that circuit-frying acid punk influence creeping into their sound here. Their particular genius is to flip between sweetness & light and something darker & heavier - a degraded psychedelia - sometimes in the space of one song. Opener, ‘Maastricht ( A Treaty)’, with its dark, distorted sitar sounds and those perfect girly voices, sounds almost ritualistic, somewhere between the Partridge Family and the Manson Family.  Single, ‘Sophomore’, another beautiful song that harks back to some of the crazier side of Jefferson Airplane, and the gorgeous ‘Freelove’, evoke hazy visions of dancing in circles in Golden Gate Park, putting flowers in the barrel of a National Guardsman's rifle and chemically assisted California dreaming.

It isn't all 'freak out' music though. The closing ‘Love, Haight & Ashbury’ is stark, sad and very moving, a love song  the Carpenters would have been proud of.

Anything else you should know? Few, if any, other bands around at the moment make such great use of the tambourine. Kirsty used to have Joni Mitchell's Blue played on the cassette player when she went to sleep as a child.

Comprising, in a nutshell, angelic choral, folk female vocals set against often mournful, dark music, the plethora of great songs on this album have led one French journalist to already describe it as the “shoegaze Rumours”.



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