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Adansonia Records

Much of the music that gets called “psychedelic” nowadays is akin to children thrashing around in the kiddie pool. The brand of psych rock that Seattle quartet Fungal Abyss create is more like plumbing the depths of the Pacific Ocean. There’s a profundity and heaviness to the group's sound that simply makes most other bands in the genre seem feeble. After issuing three full-lengths on cassette, the band’s new album, Karma Suture, is their first to get a vinyl release. This is the proper way to absorb the mammoth density and mind-bending convolutions of the group's improvisations.

Typical for these guys (who also play in the equally important and cerebral metal group Lesbian), Karma Suture contains two long tracks: the 22-minute “Perfumed Garden” and the 23-minute “Virile Member.” The former starts with a deceptively easygoing groove and ominous guitar tintinnabulation that recalls the late, great Seattle band Hovercraft. The rhythm guitar gradually accrues a kind of power-grunge-funk motion. Things lift off to the point where guitarists Arran McInnis and Daniel La Rochelle are freaking out in their own maniacal spheres, yet they’re also complementing each other. Meanwhile drummer Benjamin Thomas-Kennedy and bassist Dorando Hodous hold down a metronomic, mantric rhythm that keeps the tank steadily zooming down the Autobahn. One is left to surmise that the stamina required to keep up this sort of high-level headfuckery can only be sustained by heroic dosages of magic mushrooms laced with Adderall. Whatever the case, “Perfumed Garden” blasts out of the water just about any other act that dares to use the descriptor “psychedelic.”

“Virile Member” (humor does belong in music) starts at maximum thrusting power and never relents, moving with a foreboding inexorability that would work gangbusters in a cinematic battle scene. McInnis and La Rochelle keep piling on the snarling and wailing guitar flares that ascend in flaming helices, until the song sounds like a duel between Jimi Hendrix and Chrome’s Helios Creed. Again, the stalwart rhythm section maintains a sensual propulsion (remember the song title) and the Sonic Youth dictum that “Confusion Is Sex” comes to frightening fruition in the ecstatic, strafing guitar interplay.

Psychedelic music can take many forms, obviously, but when the members of Fungal Abyss get behind the wheel, you know you’re in for the most cyclonic ride of your life.