Morgan Delt – Morgan Delt
This is just one of two LPs released on the same day by Chicago psyche label Trouble In Mind so it’s only fair that we play a little compare and contrast. In one corner you have 60s-style jammer Doug Tuttle, songwriter and guitarist in the now-defunct New Hampshire band MMOSS and in the other Morgan Delt, Californian long-hair and rhyming slang expert (in some quarters Morgan Delt = melt). And melt you do into a kaleidoscopic haze of deep tabla drums and five decades’ worth of psyche-pop confetti.
It goes without saying then that Tuttle is the more traditional of the two for Delt is more of a Wayne Coyne-style protégée, skittering between classic grooves, improv psyche, leftfield pop and West Coast harmonies to name but a few – “Mr. Carbon Copy”, for example, comes from the same scruffy state as Ariel Pink. Delt is also the rarest of creatures it turns out: the hyperactive stoner. There are hence no repeato-rock endurance tests here. He prefers ideas: ideas stacked on ideas. Some are fully explored and some are left to gloop around the candy-cotton landscape like the inside of lava lamp.
Of course none of this is news to those familiar with Delt’s ear-catching cassette Psychic Death Hole, the majority of which is here captured again alongside new material. And the likes of the druggy “Barbarian Kings” sound as fresh as they did then, its beguiling mix of Eastern lurch and very woozy psyche-pop played off against little guitar explosions that shake you out of your tremulous reverie.
Delt is a psyche collagist, esoteric and exciting, his dominant bass, distorting garage-production echo and studio FX feeling like they hail from different planetary systems never mind different artists. Accordingly, “Sad Sad Trip” sounds like a creaking carnival ride led by an intergalactic shaman. Earlier, and similarly ill at ease, the slow-chiming and paranoid “Little Zombies” adds a sense of narrative-cum-allegory to proceedings with a late charge of flower power. Love, and psyche, you see, will conquer all.
Best tracks: “Barbarian Kings” and “Mr. Carbon Copy”
~The self-titled LP is released 27th January 2014 on Trouble In Mind.~