27 September 2023

MELT PLASTIC GROUP – Hooh (2023, LP Feral Child Records)

RELEASE INFO:

Label: Feral Child Records

Format: LP, Album, Limited Edition, Red Vinyl (Comes with a Melt Plastic Group beer mat)

LP Release Date: 23 Aug 2023

Bandcamp Release Date: 27 Oct 2022

Let me start by saying that if I had discovered this album at the time it was released – digital through Bandcamp on 27 Oct 2022 – I would DEFINITELY have included it among the list of my personal 50 albums of 2023, and no lower than the 3^rd place! Yeah, exactly! That Good!

Melt Plastic Group is a Psychedelic Rock trio, hailing from Brighton (UK), and from the info I gathered from their Bandcamp page they have digitally released 2 albums, “Black Rock, Yellow Room” (November 2020) and “The Birdman Explodes” (November 2021), which means that “Hooh” is their 3^rd album but their 1^st physical one – their debut vinyl – although it is released almost a year after the digital version! The trio of Melt Plastic Group consists of Willy A. Robinson (Words, Lead Vocals, Guitar, Harmonica, Keys), Jessica FF Lazzeri (Bass), and GaX (Drums, Vocals, Keys, Guitar). The album is released through Feral Child Records and here’s what the label states:

“Next up on Feral Child sees an absolute beast of a full length; the debut wax outing for the whacked out, psych sounds of MELT PLASTIC GROUP. A uniquely fresh take on mind-melting psych grooves and kraut jams, hugely ambitious and constantly inventive and evolving….
In the bands’ own words, they describe themselves and the album as “channelled onto wax via three humans from Brighton and Hove; inspired by the uniquely warped vision of former Sunlight Service Group frontman Willy Robinson, who lives in Hove but opts to inhabit a universe where tentacled aliens hang out with talking vegetables against a backdrop of brutalist 1970s concrete”.
On “Hooh”, Willy, Jess and Gax have summoned a collection of darkly spaced-out, hypnotic, jazzy jams, where sprinkles of flute and harmonica frolic around a maypole of juicy guitar fuzz. Although there are nods towards the likes of Black Sabbath and Can, the album’s unique flavour deftly swerves the cliches of the psych genre. It’s their finest work to date”….
“Hooh” contains 8 tracks in total, 4 on each side of the LP album, and it kicks off with the self-titled “Hooh”, a lysergic fuzzy n’ trippy ACID guitar sound (that directly brings to mind My Solid Ground and their 1971 track, “The Executioner”) captivates the listener by the very first second! A trippylicious slow mynd-blending and super Psychedelic soundscape, getting slower, trippier, entering deeper in the dark side of the Mynd, leading the unsuspecting victim/listener to a kind of trembling Ecstasy! Melt Plastic Group uses the same dark creep-a-delic PSYCH slow atmosphere on “A.Egg”, but this time flute and harmonica are driving the song into a new ‘Krauty’ territory, there are no lyrics here and the whole thing is acting like a mind-blowing spaced out jazzy jam, resulting some serious Poisonous Psych music! “Midnight Mint” starts… Holy Shit! WHAT THE FUCK is this? You have to listen to… There are no words to describe this tremendous Intoxicating Hallucinated piece of Acid Psychedelia with these lysergically trippy and kind of stoned operatic lyrics! Wow!!! “Free Token” uses an even more slow background, diving deeper into this dark sea of poisonous liqueur, also no words here, a mynd-melting Psychedelic scenery with a repeated trippy n’ creepy Psych melody capable enough to burn your brains off! Side ‘B’ opens with the lysergically trippy “Oh Rotten Snake”, fuzzy and wag-wah effected while you can feel Acid Psych running down your spine, and it makes me wonder… is this the path that Sabbath would choose if they have stayed ‘close’ to the Psychedelic era of their early times? Unbelievable track… “Incredible Journey” is a boiled Krauty and Psych-o-Melting Lysergic Acid Diethylamide TRIP using the wah-wah guitar as the ‘medium’ to get where it’s supposed to be, a stoned-to-the-bone track! “Sasparilla” is an Acid Psychedelic liturgy, Kraut inspired with chanting-like vocals, this is Mynd-Bending PSYCH emerging a strong Kosmische feel, absolutely hallucinatory, Krauty Trip-A-Delia at its best! Eventually, the album comes to an end with “Very Tall Grass”, a Psychedelic stoned Acid n’ Fuzzy wah-wah tune that melts early Sabbath, early Floyd, early Ozrics, while for once more I caught myself wondering “Am I inside Morgen’s lone LP from 1969?”… Everything by now has turned to Purple, Eternity is in Between… Ladies and Gentlemen, Psychedelians all over the world… Welcome to the Void!!!

So, in conclusion… Melt Plastic Group is a true modern continuer of the Old Psychedelic Tradition and albums like “Hooh” are a very rare phenomenon these uninspired strange days we are living, so do yourself a favor and grab (as long as it lasts) the vinyl LP album of “Hooh”, one of the best albums of the Modern Age of Psychedelia, one of the Best Albums for the last 20 or so years!!! TimeLord Michalis
(by the way, I urge you to visit their Bandcamp page and listen to their previous 2 albums, you will totally be ‘addicted’ to Melt Plastic Group)