The Tear Garden - The Brown Acid Caveat FLAC

The Tear Garden have always been a band unafraid to delve ever more deeply into their nocturnal psychedelic wanderings, where here on The Brown Acid Caveat, the band advance those chemical manifestations with an expression of being both lost and out of time are carried forth in a more even handed fashion, in a flowing electronically backed manner, suitable for a dark dancehall filled with upturned gothic faces waiting on the chemical vampires to mythically materialize just as the clock strikes midnight, to shower those willing, with a mind bending kaleidoscopic explosion of sonic synth brain expansions.

There’s nothing not to like here, it’s all been heard and done before (“Lola’s Rock” drifts darkly back to the Kinks’ song “Lola,” though it’s a much more hunting vision of astrology, drugs and transsexuality here), often better, though more often worse, with a number of these tracks being totally avoidable, yet in the setting of a live venue, I would imagine that these musical structures flower much better. That said, I’m not quite sure why the album needs to hover about for eighty minutes, though I’d suggest that since the album was fan-funded, the band wished to give those who made this record possible a full throttle investment, though as I’ve suggested, a bit less of the not so good would have made the release all that better, effective and memorable.

The album is a collaboration of sorts, though perhaps suggesting guest appearances by members of The Legendary Pink Dots and Skinny Puppy might be more accurate. Together these folks have laid down electronic mixes that are quite strong and initially interesting, though methinks that no one was considering the longevity of the music, where they were entirely focused on being in the now, in the minute, hoping that by the time the adventure was over, the band and the audience would have been magically spirited into some ominous hypnotic ethereal ever-after.

In all honesty, the music wasn’t for me, leaving me feeling as if I’d managed to find myself lost in a daunting tape loop from the David Bowie movie The Hunger, as there was absolutely far too much that left me feeling uncommonly uncomfortable and ill-defined. On a positive note, the manner of English story telling is totally embraced, where their traditional narrative styles are matched beat for beat with electronic strings and violins, leaving several songs to be balanced by other worldly vocal crescendos that are entirely effective.

*** The Fun Facts: As to the album’s title, an actual brown acid caveat was issued at the Woodstock Music & Arts Festival back in the summer of 1969, where attendees where warned to stay away from the unsafe brown acid that was circulating though the event. The album cover suggests a medieval landscape, from a time when entire communities often tripped-out, saw both god and the devil, while the heavens opened up with maddening thunder and dancing star constellations, all due to a naturally occurring mold that grew on the wheat, a precursor to synthesized lysergic acid diethylamide.

Review by Jenell Kesler