STORIES OF THE ASTRAL LIZARD

It seems like everywhere you go there is yet another psychedelic stoner jam band cranking out trippy instrumental music that channels the zeitgeist of the unfulfilled 60s and harnesses its creative tap into the modern day studios to create some of the clearest sounding psychedelia possible. Meanwhile in Russia, the Moscow based THE RE-STONED are doing just that. This one has five members: Ilya Lipkin (electric & acoustic guitars, fx, bass, mandolina), Evgeniy Tkachev (aka Rasputin) (percussion, rain stick), Alexander Romanov (bass), Arkadiy Fedotov (synth), Sergey Andriashin (bass) and Alina Barsukova (flute).

STORIES OF THE ASTRAL LIZARD is their eighth album and unlike more rock oriented upbeat bands like Ozric Tentacles or more compositionally inclined artists of the classic rock era (ie Pink Floyd, Can, The Doors), THE RE-STONED are about floating along rather linearly through space rock time in a chilled out and nonchalant manner. In fact i'd call this batch of seven tracks rather monotonous and repetitive as at the music itself is a simple lollygag through time with no compositional variations and any complexity at all results from the production (which is excellent) and the light riffing of the guitar.

One of the problems with THE RE-STONED is that they fail to stand out from the multitude of similar artists (Foggy Realm, Maat Lander, Waldsonne, Tuber, Prana Craftler, Ecstatic Vision just to name a ver few) and offer very little to make this an interesting listen for an active listener. Like much of this style of music, it is completely cool background music that you can crank up while engaging in other multi-tasking and is appropriately a non-primary attention span backdrop since you never feel like you're missing out on anything if you happen to be only half present.

However, there are so many more interesting psychedelic space rock bands out there these days that manage to straddle the line between compositionally creative and second-handedly backdrop material (Virgen Sideral and Pixie Ninja are a couple favorites). This is one of those that if it happens to be playing i'm fine with it but hardly something i would seek out for my own personal listening pleasure. The ultimate example of good but not essential. In a way some of this reminds me the most of some of those Buckethead Pikes that take a mellow rock track that swallow up a whole album without really doing anything except add some swishy swirling synths around a snail-paced guitar riff.