Word: psychedelia
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Manwaring was schooled in the dogmas of visual rationalism just at the moment when the crude baroque of psychedelia was popping up on posters all over San Francisco. That formative combination may explain why Manwaring still seeks to produce images on the border between the orderly and the wild, at once restrained and mannerist. A wine label for Sonoma County's small Hanna Winery, for example, is no neat, well-behaved rectangle but an asymmetrical ziggurat with type stacked in surprising ways. For a poster meant to express the idea of summer, a fragment of architectural statuary is enclosed within...
...knowledge of musical genres allows him to change styles like hats. Invisible, for instance, begins with a fairly straight-forward pop tune, "All I Want To Do Is Fall In Love." From this base, however, Hitchcock takes off and explores country and western ("Give Me A Spanner, Ralph"), 60s psychedelia ("Grooving On An Inner Plane"), experimental noise ("Let There Be More Darkness") and improvised blues-grunge ("Blues...
Mould's guitar is the backbone of this album--whether he's bashing out thickly fuzzed Heavy Metal riffs or breaking through the rhythm section with wildly distorted psychedelia. Meanwhile, drummer Grant Hart--who wrote many of the songs on the album--keeps things going, especially when Mould's guitar work ossifies into hackwork...
...doubt, but then this prodding message seems to have less in common with the nihilism of the punk movement than with the more expansive hippie movement of the sixties. Husker Du's true roots, as this album and their single "Eight Miles High" demonstrate, are set firmly within psychedelia. You can hear it in Mould's leads, which seem to have timewarped in from songs like the Beatles' "I'm Only Sleeping" or the Byrds' "Eight Miles High." You can hear it in the tinkling harmonies and the choruses of songs like "Pink Turns to Blue" or "Whatever...
Unlike Three O'Clock or Echo and the Bunnymen, Husker Du is not just reviving psychedelia: they are revitalizing it, which, if you think about it, is kind of ironic. In the late sixties, much of the psychedelic music of the Byrds, the Beatles and Love were created through intensive and deliberate studio work. Now, 15 years later, Husker Du is bringing back the spirit and sound of psychedelia by keeping as far away from the studio as is humanly possible...