The packaging for Psychic Ills' third album Inner Journey Out - complete with brown paper inner sleeve - is a loving, expensive reproduction of a bootleg LP, of an item predominantly of interest to historians and completists only. If you were feeling unkind you could suggest that the same description would apply to the music within: a painstaking recreation of Spacemen 3, Mazzy Star and This Mortal Coil, acts who themselves had lifted many of their sonic cues from the previous generation - the nocturnal drones of the Velvet Underground, the "it's so very lonely"-ness of the Stones' "2000 Light Years From Home", the cracked, desolate glory of Big Star's Third/Sister Lovers; a copy of a copy, to be enjoyed exclusively by the kind of psych festival frequenter who spends weekends standing contentedly through 20 variations on Wooden Shjips.
Personally, I don't have a problem with this - in part, because I'm a sucker for this particular sound, but also because it's what rock'n'roll has always done (when Tres Warren sings about there being "too much monkey business" on "Mixed Up Mind", he's - consciously or not - joining a line which stretches back to Chuck Berry via Elvis, the Beatles, Dylan's delivery on "Subterranean Homesick Blues", Johnny Thunders' "Too Much Junkie Business" and the Jesus & Mary Chain's Munki; when he needed a sleepily seductive female counterpoint for "I Don't Mind", he turned to Mazzy Star's Hope Sandoval, just like the Mary Chain and Chemical Brothers before him).
Finally, I'm fine with it because it's resulted in an assured, beautiful, classic-sounding Psychic Ills record. The production is superb: Yoed Nir's string arrangements bring a melancholic beauty to "Back To You" and "No Worry", while the gorgeous gospel-style backing vocals of Lady Peachena and Nadine Simmons lift "Another Change", "New Mantra" and "Baby" onto the same higher ground as Spiritualized.
There are very few wig-outs, little of the noise found on previous projects. Organs hum incessantly but quietly beneath strummed acoustic guitars. This is a mellower LP about shutting out the modern world, getting more sleep ("I don't drink Coca-Cola no more" goes "Coca-Cola Blues"), coming up with a new mantra, turning one's focus inwards in an attempt to find some kind of peace. "Only you know where you have been to, only you know what you have been through" reads a quote from the great Dion DiMucci on the gatefold sleeve. "Feel like I'm alone, I've got confusion in my mind", Warren sings towards the end of the album, "but I'm alright".
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