Liam Hayes – Slurrup

★★

Psychedelic rock is big business nowadays.  What with Tame Impala and Foxygen riding their obvious influences to indie success, and the rather more scorching garage rock movement wrecking small venues across the continent, it’s now an established path to the, er, “top”.  Liam Hayes has been putting out this sort of music since Nirvana was a white-hot, cutting-edge band; Slurrup is his fifth studio album since 1998 and it trades in the sort of stuff that all the kids seem to like – the Who, the Kinks, Psychedelic London.  The problem here, though, is that it’s all just a bit too pat.  He writes decent psych-rock nuggets in a manner that would have put him in the top ten in a battle of the bands in 1966.  So what?  Guided By Voices does the early Who better.  Ty Segall makes much more engaging garage numbers.  This is psychedelic rock by numbers, filling in all the requisite pieces without really taking it anywhere.  Oh, there’s the organ, there’s the plunking piano, here’s the soaring, pastoral vibe lifted straight from The Village Green Preservation Society.  Look, there’s the weird sound collage made out of people laughing, because no one’s ever heard fucking pre-Dark Side of the Moon Pink Floyd before!  Slurrup is okay, and that’s it’s biggest stumbling block.  It’s all been done before, better, and recently to boot.