Tracklisting

01. LSD Therapy
02. Flying Mountain
03. Somebody In Your Nose
04. Overmoon
05. Lost In Space
06. I Don’t Care
07. Beware
08. Incantation
09. Silvermoon
10. Girl
11. Egg
12. Can You See ?
13. 3013
14. Virgin Sleep

In his New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1933) Freud wrote the following about the Id*, “It is the dark, inaccessible part of our personality, […] We all approach the id with analogies: we call it a chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations… It is filled with energy reaching it from the instincts, but it has no organisation, produces no collective will, but only a striving to bring about the satisfaction of the instinctual needs subject to the observance of the pleasure principle.”

I was reminded of this by the latest AOTM, ‘The Godlike Genius of Blue Cheer’ and the passing lamentation that BC (oh yeah, long BC) had been relegated into the nether regions of the Rock Pantheon, the wrecking yard, garage. And I thought, I don’t know, I think they survived there, their memory nurtured by crude shrines and lurching, seething songs of worship. And that’s when I thought of Freud and the Id: garage is rock’s Id — the demands of civilisation are ignored there, there is only instinctual energy and dark desires which brings me to…

Aqua Nebula Oscillator. A hefty chunk of Europe’s prehistoric rockpainting is found on French cave walls and it has to be *nearly* true that Aqua Nebula Oscillator were raised in those very caves. This is *primitive* acid garage punk. Throughout the 80s I had secret hopes that the delights of Pebbles Vol.3 would find a medium who would channel their sounds into a timeless postpunk ‘now’. Bands came and went but never quite delivered what I wanted — maybe Plasticland’s “Office Skills” or “Mushroom Hill”, a few years later moments of Wobble Jaggle Jiggle delivered the dirty, dark and mid-freak out freaking out sound that I was looking for but there was never a perfect acid garage punk album which was all killer until.…

Aqua Nebula Oscillator nearly pulled it off last year. The “nearly” part? The joke of “Somebody In Your Nose” wears thin quickly (unfunnily enough Wobble Jaggle Jiggle had quickly annoying ‘humourous’ tracks too). But the rest… the videos on their Myspace look like they were recorded in a cave filled with peacock feathers (well, “Flying Mountain does”) and the band sound like a hot woman cave decorated with peacock feathers. Dirty, psychedelic garage sounds with an oscillator set to attack.. like Gonn (‘Blackout of Gretely’) meets ’73 Hawkwind.

And that’s all you need to know: like Gonn (‘Blackout of Gretely’) meets ’73 Hawkwind. Track by track rundown? Nah. They *all* obliterate your good sense and rationality and free up your dark’n’dangerous musical Id.

*Obviously, not the 60s band of Freudian freakout ‘Boil the Kettle Mother’ fame, natch!