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Psychic Ills are a Brooklyn four piece who bring Spacemen 3's psych & space rock into the New York back alleys and dirty it up with some solid tribal, no-wave rhythms circa early Sonic Youth. Sonic Boom never gave a second thought to drums - often there was just a steady, small drum machine, sometimes there was just a big cloud of guitars with nothing there to pin it down. Psychic Ills' drummer is a centerpiece, always there keeping momentum going forward, pulling the song back together, keeping the guitars from drifting too far away. The band's first full length, Dins, combines four songs with four more abstract collages. The songs are outright amazing. Derivative, probably, but a big, dreamy sound with long brushstrokes and soft, bright washes of distortion. When "Electric Life" finally comes together, it creates this undeniable chug, drums and guitar locked together, pushing forward underneath a cloud of haze, keyboard vamps interjecting, just like honey. "I Knew My Name" and "Another Day Another Night" are equally breathtaking. The former matches disparate elements of a harsh military march beat and thrashing guitars with soft, highly-processed male vocals. The latter takes its guitar sound right out of Loveless, but no surprise, that huge sound exhibits equal grandeur and drama in 2005 as it did in 1991. The more amorphous pieces that flow between the "actual" songs are well done too. "Untitled" and "Inauration" are slow builds to pick up intensity before the steady guitar chug starts again, the former creating harsher metallic tones and the latter basing itself on a circular riff that grows in intensity that drops off into "I Knew My Name"'s quiet, drum-forward intro. Hand drums and Macha-esque guitar melody open the album with "East," which make me think that the band might be just as strong pared down as it is in its huge sound glory. The whole album just flows together well, one big forty minute piece of space-based exploration and improvisation with pop songs popping up inbetween the gaps. There's still a lot of gold to be mined from these sounds (why else would people have waited so long for Shields to follow up Loveless), and Psychic Ills may have the best chance of creating something new out of it, at least while still following the form of a rock band.

Psychic Ills at Amazon & Insound