Love Psychedelico – Early Times — music review

Posted on September 29, 2006 by Chris Nelson

Love Psychedelico. So the trolling of the foreign music section at the local library has been slow going these days. Misia left me cold. BoA colored me unimpressed. Mr. Children I just wasn’t feeling. I was just about to give up on the section all together, until I came across Love Psychedelico. Their pencil-stenciled Early Times – The Best Of album cover caught my eye, refreshingly muted compared to all the splashy goings-on on the covers of its peers. I took it home, popped it in the player, and…wow! I fell in love.

Love Psychedelico is what you would get if you crossed the folk sensibilities of the 60’s with the contemporary indie rock experimentalism, and guitars that would make even The Strokes’ lead guitarist jealous. It’s exactly what alt-folk rockers Tanya Donnely and Juliana Hetfield only dreamed of doing (had they the talent) back in the early 90’s; a wide range of poppy rocking folksy bluesy ohmygosh goodness.

Lead singer Kumi has one of those catchy-sour voices, a la Avril Lavigne or Alanis Morissette, only with raw emotion to back it up. Take a listen to near any track; she’s guaranteed to pull you in. Naoki, the duo’s second half, proves quite apt with the guitar – his strummings are top notch. The lyrics for all songs are a hybrid of Japanese and English, and although I have no idea what they’re saying half of the time, I know what I like. Really, the majority of these tracks are marvelous. The beautiful melody and rolling guitars of ‘Life Goes On’ (I’ve listened to it somewhere around twelve times so far), the sassy opener ‘Your Song’, the unadulterated coolness of ‘Everybody needs somebody’, ‘fantastic world’, ‘My last fight’….the list goes on and on.

If there’s one thing I found lacking in the Love Psychedelico – Early Times experience, it’s that it wasn’t brought to my attention sooner. I mean, discovering a band with its greatest hits album? I can’t believe that no one I know has heard of them. Spread the word. Love Psychedelico is fucking awesome!

Life Goes On

About the Author

Chris Nelson has a appetite for the offbeat. He has been a devoted fan of Puffy for the past five years. He realizes this review may be a bit overexcited, but he is still riding high on Love Psychedelico‘s No War, Peace, Love vibe. Rock on.