Dead Luke says it loud – he’s psyched out and he’s proud. Weaving a drone so sweet, Dead Luke is the latest in a modern revival of Sixties-style psychedelia, drained through a filter of fuzz. Released as a cassette, God Takes LSD is even more founded in faded blurs and indiscernible echoes, a knee-deep swamp collection of slow-burning sounds in ye old tradition of druggy tunes. The nods to that guy in the sky, including the alternative origin story told all in beeps and whistles, “And On The Eighth Day, God Took LSD,” read like a tongue-in-cheek Timothy Leary, a fun throwback to the time when “I was so fucked up” wasn’t quite the way you would’ve described a dosed day.
God Takes LSD marries vintage revelations trapped in colored lights with a contemporary apathy that seems at odds, but works well in songs like “I Stepped Into a Light, I Got Into a Fight” and “Hipster Trash Genocide.” Even as he emulates it, Dead Luke doesn’t quite buy into the simple “see the light” solutions of the 60s drug scene, but he also won’t sign himself over to today’s detachment.
Buried and humming, God Takes LSD lives on one plane of white noise, sometimes dropping so far off into oblivion it loses a pulse. But songs like “I Loved,” with its Lou Reed-like spoken assertions, keep the record alive in subtle variations, and like any good trip, it’s the simple pleasures and small wonders that shimmer.
God Takes LSD is available now via Moon Glyph.
