The Goald Coast Hitchhiker Murders

St. Paul and The Broken Bones release their new album The Alien Coast on ATO Records. Produced by Matt Ross-Spang, and featuring eleven new, original songs, The Alien Coast is the first St. Paul and The Broken Bones album tracked in the band’s hometown of Birmingham, AL. The arrangement allowed the octet to spend more time and tap a broader creative community than ever before, resulting in their most ambitious work to date. Led by singer and lyricist Paul Janeway - a former bank teller and preacher-in-training who learned to sing in his church choir - the octet explore thrilling new territory on The Alien Coast, a fever dream convergence of soul and psychedelia, stoner metal and funk, animated by the very “fire and brimstone” which Janeway invokes in the album’s opening line.

The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, no strangers to weirdness on their prior 1967 album Part One, had still often stuck to relatively straightforward, concise, and pop-flavored songs on that LP. Here they stretched out into less structured, more avowedly psychedelic (and indeed experimental) territory, with mixed results. "Smell of Incense" (covered for a small hit by Southwest FOB) was sublime psych-pop. Yet "Suppose They Give a War and No One Comes" was just some fool - actually the band's chief investor, lyricist, and tambourine player, Bob Markley - grafting silly, self-consciously freaky recitation of a vintage 1936 Franklin Roosevelt speech onto an ominous fuzz guitar backup. Other cuts like "In the Arena" and "Overture - WCPAEB Part II" were free-form psychedelic creepiness without the strong content of, say, likely influence Frank Zappa…

The band's third album for Reprise has its advocates among psychedelic cultists, but it really is a letdown when stacked against their previous two Reprise LPs, even if those LPs (particularly the second) were haphazard in their psychedelic-pop-folk-rock admixtures. When they play it straight, the songs are often average or even unmemorable, easy-going late-1960s L.A. rock. When they are obviously trying to be strange, as on the title cut, it sounds contrived, and if you've heard the previous Reprise LPs already, Bob Markley's occasional deranged rants will be old hat. The minute-and-a-half "Anniversary of World War III" is entirely silent: a radical notion for a rock album of the time, perhaps, but something that had already been done by John Cage. There are some pleasing moments here and there, like the melancholy folk-rock ballad "Eighteen Is Over the Hill"…