Album Reviews
Icicle Works are a young Liverpudlian group whose first album is like an aural rummage through a Haight-Ashbury head shop. It's all here: cosmic particles of thought afloat in an ether of backward guitar solos, sitarlike drones, squealing feedback and a recorder piping breathily along in a manner redolent of drugs and Donovan. And that's just one song ("Nirvana, we adore you," goes the chorus).
The Icicles bring a fresh urgency to the psychedelic-pop formula, interrupting their cranium-bending reality detours ("Culling time.../In the camp of unused dreams") with double-time choruses, Antmusic-style snare-drum rolls and minor-key melodies that hit like the first blast of autumn's chill.
The band seems fixated on elemental, outdoors things trees, seasons, birds, deserts, dragonflies seeing in the natural world a paradigm for the matter of living. Within a song, Icicle Works build, by addition, from mantralike calm to gale-force climax. The thrilling choruses and rollicking psych-pop punch of "A Factory in the Desert," "Whisper to a Scream (Birds Fly)" and "Chop the Tree," to name but a few, will shake you into a state not unlike ecstasy. Tune in and turn on. (RS 423)
PARKE PUTERBAUGH
(Posted: Jun 7, 1984)
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- Portions of Album Content Provided by All Music Guide © 2009 All Media Guide, LLC.