RISKY

Description

Toronto's protean psychedelic project LAMMPING continues its ambitious four-album series with a new LP: a lush and immersive collaboration between Drew Smith (Dr. Ew, The Bicycles) and Chris Cummings (Marker Starling). This record follows Never Never, their acclaimed collaboration with Bloodshot Bill, and sees producer Mikhail Galkin (aka DJ Alibi) and drummer Jay Anderson explore a new facet of the project's expanding sonic universe. Where Never Never blended boom-bap beats with psychedelic rockabilly, this new effort ventures into deeper, more melodic territory — "CSNY harmonies over early 90s hip-hop beats, fuzzy guitars and synth textures," as Galkin describes it. The result is both strange and familiar: a warm analog dream slowly unfolding before our eyes. "Initially, it was a pretty nice album, almost yacht rock," Galkin confesses. "But the more we recorded, the darker and heavier it got – it’s like an intense psychedelic yacht rock album, if the yacht was sinking the whole time." The album's influences extend far beyond rock and hip-hop, drawing inspiration from 60s and 70s vocal jazz (Ahmad Jamal's The Bright, The Blue and the Beautiful, Duke Pearson's How Insensitive) and psychedelic pop (Spanky and Our Gang). The result is what Chris Cummings describes as "a world of its own, both emotional and precise, like a dream whose unfolding is perfectly controlled." Like Never Never, the album also features instrumental remixes, acting as interludes, which weave connections between tracks, blurring the line between studio experimentation and conceptual work. It's a testament to Lammping's evolution, from its psych-rock beginnings to its status as an accomplished producer duo, where genre boundaries fade and, in a way, everything retains Lammping's sonic signature.