If you were a teenager growing up in the heydays of garage rock, Sloom would’ve been the band you snuck out your bedroom window and down the drainpipe to see, the one you got a mid-gig nosebleed for. The band really lend themselves to that golden era, comfortably emanating the age of grungy mess, head banging and gravelly vocals, stippled with some truly killer guitaring. The band’s latest single comes in the form of Magic Cup, and is the follow up to Kahayalan, the self-produced six-track EP the band released back in November 2014.
Sloom produce some snarling garage rock and it only makes sense that the video for their new single Magic Cup is as warped and acidic as their name.
Featuring a newly refined sound, the Inner West four-piece tear it up on Magic Cup in true psych-rock style. And, as you’d expect from a band that tout John Dwyer (Thee Oh Sees) and Ty Segall as inspiration, the track is energetic, grungy and overlaid with a bluesy growl. It balances that difficult dance of being chaotic without becoming truly unruly, remaining deliberately unpolished and all the better for it, as the guys layer in addictive riffs and punches of guitar twangs, interposed with occasional whoops and shrieks.
Ultimately it’s a track that’s more about the instrumentals than the vocals – and why the hell not: these guys can really work their way around a guitar. But amongst the rough and ready garag-y grit, lyrics come through in the form of insightful little nuggets like “Hold your breath until you die.” A joint venture shared between Chris Diamond and Christian Di Paolo, they’re delivered with stings of elongated distortion, which add a meaty punch. Let’s not beat around the bush though, the climax of it all is a truly stellar guitar solo, a seriously impressive execution of shredding that squeezes in great flurries of notes that trip carefully into each other, awash in reverb, and we’re all over it.
We all know too that garage rock is a genre that begs to be viewed live; raucous and jostling for space shoulder to shoulder in some sticky floored basement bar. So it seems pretty appropriate that the video for Magic Cup is set exclusively on a stage, shot in fuzzy grains and the occasional wobbly mirage, graduating in layers of band members who’ve been cut out in thick white outlines. It’s laced with mirror images and trippy kaleidoscope patterns that expand and contract in colourful, hypnotic phantasmagoria. Definitely worth sneaking down a few drainpipes for.
