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