Platoon

About

Few outfits have mastered the art of creating endlessly digressive, acid-damaged psychedelia as completely as San Francisco’s Magic Lantern. Their first two full-lengths slowed the primitive assault of Blue Cheer to a druggy crawl, giving listeners ample time to bask in the radiance of layer upon layer of bristling feedback. Magic Lantern’s third full-length, <i>Platoon</i>, finds the band slightly picking up the tempo and immersing itself in the more aggressive, rhythmically demanding sounds of late-‘60s and early-‘70s funk. If efforts like <i>High Beam</i> looked to Sabbath and Earth for inspiration, <i>Platoon</i> takes early Funkadelic as its primary touchstone, meaning that the drums hit harder and the tempos move at a faster clip than on earlier Magic Lantern releases. The only real misstep here is the group’s cover of Iron Knowledge’s incendiary early-‘70s funk-rock obscurity “Showstopper,” which, though serviceable, doesn’t capture the original recording’s wild-eyed conviction.

via Apple Music