The Green Hour Band (Kingdom)

The name refers to the practice of sipping absinthe, but the Green Hour Band’s debut sounds more like the result of bathtub acid. These local boys have already been noted here and elsewhere for insisting the ’60s never ended, and they offer eight songs to further demonstrate their natural feel for a certain period of music, specifically, when the Beatles coaxed everybody out of the garage and into either hopped-up freakbeat or full-blown psychedelia. As such, there are echoes of the lysergically inspired fab forefathers and their kin all over The Green Hour Band.

“Intro” squeezes all of George Harrison’s Wonderwall Music into one-and-a-half minutes, the cut-up carnival organ of “The Clocktowers Request” was formerly for the benefit of a certain Mr. Kite, and in “Chapter 123”, the boys of the Green Hour Band shamelessly steal “Polythene Pam”, add their own lyrics, and splice it to something that might have been provided by Piper-era Syd Barrett. Tortured analogue vocal effects, oddball and vaguely eastern-sounding instrumentation, and the occasional lyrical concession to the band’s obsessions further the effect.

Rowe is more oblique elsewhere on the album, and the band never fully commits itself to all-out retro-delia. An overarching DIY feel bridges the then and the now, as does a certain, hard-to-pin unwholesomeness underneath everything. Maybe it’s Clint Stims’s relentlessly dirty bass, or Rowe’s insolently flat vocalizing (and that’s not a complaint), but The Green Hour Band is consequently a lot more than just a well-researched exploding plastic fuck.