Jacco Gardner’s take on psychedelia is not wholly dissimilar to that of Django Django: washed out and bleached, tending towards the dazed rather than the engaged. However, where they embrace modernity, Gardner eschews it – it’s not so much that this is a period pastiche, more that he’s settled himself in a comfortable place that he has no interest in leaving. He’s also very much a believer in less being more: melodies alter incrementally, rather than through big chord or key changes. At its best, on the eight-minute Before the Dawn, that means songs like a fever dream, reveries that gain impact from the repetition and the extension of a simple idea beyond its logical endpoint. But it also makes Hypnophobia a bright, shiny surface without the rough points that provide traction. It’s pleasurable, but it’s hard not think that a little varying of the approach might pay dividends.
