Album Review: Arcadian Child – Superfonica

Arcadian Child
Superfonica
Rogue Wave Records/Ripple Music
★★★★

There is a deep, immense trench of emotion flowing through the psychedelic overtones of Arcadian Child’s Superfonica. Instead of a burning flame of psychedelic wonderment, Arcadian Child gives you a premise of a glorious underworld crawling with dark fantasies and strange undercurrents. Some songs reach out with rock and roll extravagance while others are filled with faded memories.

I feel like I have been in this daze before but not with Arcadian Child’s perception. The nostalgia of it is not a retro-version of psych rock. The deja vu lies in the exodus of sound. “Bain Marie,” as an intro, drifts away from its source. The cord is cut and we are falling deeper and deeper into the dark matter.

Arcadian Child – Twist Your Spirit

“Twist Your Spirit” is as close as we get to what can be defined as pure psych-rock. The song has a sense of vibrance through the song’s guitar-drenched sexuality. That road rhythm sparks denim and danger. This Cyprus band knows how to capture the highway sound even if that path winds around the foothills and beachside of Greece.

The darkest hour resides with “Brothers.” Low-level bass lines fuel this ritual. It leads to the glimmer of guitar notes, the fragility amongst the turbulence of the world that surrounds us in this Bowie-esque atmosphere. The song is real heavy, man. It may require a breather before you continue.

“Constellations” fuel that THC jam while “Before We Die,” is primal tribalism in a fuzzed-out echo chamber. You can see where this album lies in the continuum of rock pleasure. Although there is a landscape yet to explore, from the derivative of this psych song collective, Superfonica is an immersive album. It makes me want to go back and dig into their debut Afterglow to see how it all started and to speculate where it all will go.