For anyone
who thinks that soul is missing from the indie scene, you have just found your
band. Taking mindbending genre mashing to another level, early 90s soulful
shoegazers The Veldt have returned with a new EP, The Shocking Fuzz of Your
Electric Fur: The Drake Equation EP, their first record under that name since
1994. Formed by brothers Daniel and Danny Chavis, The Veldt where truly sonically
groundbreaking, although fusing rock guitars, beats and soul together had been
done before…….check out Tackhead who, featuring musicians from The Sugarhill Gang,
recorded one genius psychedelicized record and one indifferent album for
On-U-Sound at the turn of the 90s….raised on a diet of gospel, Motown and Pink
Floyd, they created celestial music that sounds like a holy union between
Prince and the Cocteau Twins. However back in the day The Velt got washed away
in a massive tsunami of record company indifference……….they wanted a band that
sounded like more conventional black Rock acts such as Living Colour and Lenny Kravitz,
whereas The Veldt were more stylistically similar to AR Kane (another massively
under rated band from that period). Following a period recording as Apollo
Heights, The Veldt are now back and it’s not as if they have changed their
sound any………it’s that the world has finally caught up.
The title of the EP was
borrowed from an E.E. Cummings poem and its raging sound was influenced equally
by the emotional soul of Marvin Gaye, free jazz cosmic explorers Sun Ra and
Pharaoh Sanders, various Drake hip-hop tracks, and their own productive
electric imagination. The first single taken from the EP is the emotionally
wrought ‘Sanctified’, a ballad that perfectly captures the lush sound of
Danny’s swirling guitars and
decibel-breaking distortion, along with Daniel’s soulful wail and Hayato
Nakao’s deep bass grooves and guitar feedback………. The
Veldt take the sweet soul sounds of the Southern states, infuse with dope beats
and then bathe the whole thing with blissed out guitar in an audacious mash up
of genres that serves as the perfect re-introduction to this dynamic band. The
rest of the tracks on this album have a comparable structure………it is absolutely
far out and of the newer bands working on the edge of definable genres within
the more accessible Indie universe only bands such as TV On The Radio and
Yeasayer can come anywhere close. The
Shocking Fuzz of Your Electric Fur is Psychedelic Soul for the new millennium,
it’s the kind of music that Norman Whitfield would be making at Motown if he
was operating with a blown mind in 2016 and the only thing getting in way of
The Veldt this time round is that if people don’t get it. This record has completely
messed with our heads and we can’t wait for the Resurrection Hymns LP which
will drop later this year via SonaBLAST! Records.
Due to be released on 18th
March and available now to pre-order, available from The Veldt Bandcamp page at http://theveldtmusic.bandcamp.com/releases
where it comes as either a CD or digital download. The Shocking Fuzz of Your
Electric Fur will also be released on vinyl via UK label Leonard Skully Records.
A brilliant record, you really need to check it out………………it will blow your mind
People.
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