Monday's Long Songs

Last Friday saw the release of Rude Audio and Dan Wainwright's new album Psychedelic Science. Mark and Dan recorded it holed up in North Wales and brought into being an album which marries dub with 60s psychedelia and the voices of American guru Ram Dass and Ken Kesey's bus driver Ken Babbs'. Not only do they manage to pull those seemingly disparate ingredients together into a cohesive whole but Psychedelic Science is already sounding like one of the albums of the summer. 

The album opens with Be Love, a slo- mo, blissed out dub groove with the voice of Ram Dass setting the scene for what follows over the next eight songs, an eight minute excursion that sounds like waking up after you've had exactly the right amount of sleep to find the sun shining and the day ahead looking good.

Over the course of the next six songs Mark and Dan take their chunky, cosmic dub to new places- from the bassline led, sci fi cover of The Grateful Dead's Fire On The Mountain to the chuggy bounce of The Fever and the off kilter, bass rumble of El Qasr. They cover Bowie's Heroes, a spoken word dub cover no less, with Ken Babbs from the Electric Kool Aid Acid Test on vocals. 

Control has a lovely snaking melody, chopped up vocals and wandering bass. On the spaced out Talking To The Sun Dan sings, his voice cut through the glorious fug. Finally, they reach some of kind of conclusion with the closing track, the twenty minute Patience Dub (A Prog Odyssey), the kind of thing that in lesser hands would be too much. Mark and Dan make a twenty minute track seem, if anything, too short. Music to be enveloped by and to drift away to. Buy Psychedelic Science digitally or on CD at Bandcamp.