It’s all under the sign of a vital eclecticism. The debut of the Sand Pebbles, a quartet led by guitarist Ben Michael X and bassist Christopher Hollow that Camera Obscura is righteously proud of, after promoting with remarkable success, albeit within an underground context, their 7" ‘Noah’s Ark’ and after recording the enthusiastic reception of ‘My Sensation’, anticipated in mp3 format on the label’s site. A pride also generated from the fact that, among so many exotic flowers in their multicoloured catalogue, the Sand Pebbles variety is 100% Australian, even showing to a great extent a reconnection of their sound with that of the made-in-Oz psyche-pop scene of some fifteen years ago. The little internet hit ‘My Sensation’ opens the programme with funky veined vibrations in a Some Girls/Emotional Rescue-period Stones temper, but with a bit of Primal Scream indie roughness, and ‘Out of my Mind with Dope and Speed’ follows as a Julian Cope tribute close in spirit to the original model, with Andrew Tanner’s distinctive falsetto in good evidence. Somewhere else it’s instead the Spacemen 3’s minimal rhythm scans to be profitably used, often with a dancing grace that will make the antennas of those fans of our own underground scene that were previously exposed to Valvola’s bewitching frequencies get up: it’s the case of the cinematic ‘The Sundowner’, but in a certain sense also of ‘Charmed, introduced by radio voices and solved in a soft psychedelic orchestration. The tempting ‘Moving Too Fast’, a rarefied and circular nebula in the same constellation of Galaxie 500, reflects at best the intimate side of a band that, when required, know how to activate an exothermal fission in electricity and rhythm without any problem. Beautiful and enticing.

- Enrico Ramunni