MT. OSSA had their first residency at the Echo on Wednesday night and although I had never heard of them, a good-sized crowd had come to plunge into their surfing-dancing psychedelia. They had turned the lights down really down and the quintet was playing in front of kaleidoscopic and colorful images, of course, reinforcing the psychedelic ambiance.
Their first number, ‘Pocket full of kids’, an instrumental opening their debut record ‘Homework Machine’, was some strange and slow dancefloor buried in loudness and distortion, a long jam with a synth line piercing the fuzz. Many of the following songs made me think about Australian psy-rockers ‘Tame Impala’, with druggy-dreamy-monotonous vocals drowning in walls of fuzzy guitars, as Kurt Vile also does. The whole thing had some acid-trip-experience potential, and during the entire set, it was difficult to distinguish anything or even their silhouettes marbled with rainbow of colors, Technicolor waves and this effect was totally fitting their musical style. May be all this was allowing us to fully experience the songs, may be it was there to hypnotize us even more. I was wondering whether some people in the crowd had started to smoke weed, but it was actually not necessary, the trip was really there on stage, and totally drug-free.
Fluid synth pop ‘Love Jam’ was borrowing to 80s dance pop, while ‘Solar Skate’ started with lots of drumming, sidereal distortion and a gliding effect; everything sounded layered, distant and lost behind a foggy wall of sound, not even afraid to explore dissonance… ‘Khella’ has even a happy surf-theme going on and the last one, ‘Worst Weather’ was far less fuzzy with almost-African guitars and a close-to-jazz vibe, before ending into a massive jam psy-fest. All I can say is that the band was adventurous with the sound and very far away from the indie-rock clichés.
They put their entire album on Soundcloud, but honestly listening to it online only reproduced a tamed-down version of the spacey live experience. They got to open for rock legend Todd Rundgren on July 8th, which is quite an accomplishment for a barely-known local band (they are from Orange County), but Mt. OSSA’s Tony Tancredi explained to the OC weekly how they got the gig: ‘All I did was email his people about the gig, and they got back to us saying Todd was into it and loved the sound’. Since Rundgren loves Tame Impala – he has called their sound ‘neo-psychedelia’ and has remixed one of their songs ‘Elephant’ – may be I was into something when I thought about Tame Impala!