A slow burn is something that very few bands have a real handle over only because it’s such a hard thing to pull off even just once. For those who do achieve it, it typically comes in the form of just one song, a few songs, or, much more rarely, a constant display throughout an album. It’s not often enough, though, that the entire album itself is used as a vessel for a truly long-form slow burn that expands beyond one track to encapsulate the whole of the work. I wasn’t expecting that when I came up to Shaman Elephant’s latest, yet what I found was nothing short of magnificent.

It tends to be from some variety of doom that we see slow burn given the qualities and history of the sound, but that doesn’t mean that plenty of others are ripe for exercising the slow burn, especially when it’s put in capable hands. Psych rock sounds absolutely perfect to accomplish something like that, and if you have any sort of doubt then you need to immediately sit down and listen to “Wide Awake But Still Asleep” in order to be shown the glorious truth in all of its multi-layered wonder. Shaman Elephant knew exactly how to start off this album as we’re immediately thrown into hypnotic dreamscapes that we aimlessly float through as this quartet guide us through the realms without any real destination, but it’s as the record progresses that the energy picks up, the destination becomes much more focused, and the gripping hooks of Shaman Elephant have sunk deep by this time. But, like many things, it’s the journey that’s more valuable than the ultimate destination, and “Wide Awake But Still Asleep” is no different simply because it’s so rewarding and spectacular just to immerse yourself in everything that this work has to offer with it being very rare that there’s a moment that you’d want to skip over for it’s just all gripping right from the get-go. Add on top of that mild psychedelia that’s always present but never once overflowing from every note like many of my preferred releases of the style, and “Wide Awake But Still Asleep” quickly rises the ranks as one of those albums that every fan of the style should go out of their way to investigate at least once. It’s something that I’ll undoubtedly be reimmersing myself in multiple times in just the next few days, and, surely, well beyond that.

When I set out today to find some psych-rock to review, I was going for the same stuff that I usually do: material along the lines of Black Space Riders, The Re-Stoned, My Sleeping Karma, etc., etc. But, the beauty of the vast library that is Bandcamp has done me a great service again to as after sifting through potential releases for about an hour, I came across what Shaman Elephant has done here and I’m still blown away by it even after listening to it for many hours after discovery. Everything about “Wide Awake But Still Asleep” scratches that itch I constantly have for psychedelic rock, and it will undoubtedly do the same for your’s.

LISTEN to “Wide Awake But Still Asleep” on Bandcamp here.

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