With Pan White Manna are on top form, showing the way for upcoming acts & those of the same pedigree and maturity alike. Not for nothing is this record named after the half man, half goat god of Greek myth, seeping into your consciousness as its songs do yet playfully inspiring acts of great movement with the likes of the full-on rocking 'Evil'.

Having personally enjoyed seeing the band in a live setting last year at the Liverpool Psychfest to finally have the newest tracks from that event set in a home setting is fantastic. As the opening (& titular) track straight away blasts off on a space rock flight you know this is an album you'll be coming back to time & again throughout the months ahead. Big riffs that demand to be played loud all Summer.

Add to that the slower, more head-messing, likes of 'Dunes II' and you're pretty much on the way to having a classic album of the genre on your hands. Landscape & an appreciation of it are cited as informing a great deal of the writing herein and the guitar work on this particular track certainly take the mind on a soaring flight from which you can well visualise seeing the sun-seared inland reaches of Northern California from above.

Following on from 2014s Live Frequencies album, featuring performances from Rouen & Copenhagen, Pan is a triumphant return to the studio for White Manna and a release that no self-respecting psych fan should leave out of their collection. It's at one & the same time as old as the hills and as fresh as a newly cooked up batch of acid, still cooling in its beaker. Except you'll not even need the latter to become fully immersed in its trip over the former & beyond.    

Pan is available from amazon, iTunes & bandcamp.

Speaking of White Manna live here's an hour of them just that way from a couple of months ago.

An image of chorines adrift in the Old West is readily brought to mind on the opening track of The Sandwitches’ Our Toast. The trio sing sweetly but nevertheless with a nervy undertone as the mildly sinister, Brechtian bar room piano tinkles away on ‘Sunny Side’. Welcome to a place where The Dresden Dolls meet David Lynch.

It’s not all implied weirdness and faint peril on this second album from the trio of Grace Cooper, Roxanne Young & Heidi Alexander as ‘Sleeping Practice’ is a pretty straight forward campfire song over the barest amount of acoustic guitar and wire-brushed snare. The louche, cocktail proffering gent on the album’s cover is a bit of a visual red herring in terms of the album’s musical content in the main but fourth track ‘Dead Prudence’ does achieve a beguiling, late-night-small-stage-red-velvet kind of ambience. The last drunks have paired off and made it onto the dancefloor to slowly circle around for what might be the night’s final number but the chap in the smoking jacket’s still happy enough to serve up one of his ‘special’ Martinis.

Perfect for soundtracking either the last half hour of your dwindling house party or the entirety of your Sunday come down this is an album where the vocals manage to reach the heights but not to a histrionic degree, the music succeeds in being comforting yet melancholic and understanding & you’re left with the feeling that this is where you wanted to get to and it’s alright to do it all over again now that you know where you’ll land.

What, from its title, you might assume to be the more upbeat highlight of the album as a whole, ‘Wickerman Mambo’, is unfortunately a minor letdown (Summer Isle doesn’t get the Cuban treatment) and in ending the album rather sidles quietly offstage, albeit with those chorines maybe rather more certain than they were at the beginning of the affair that their fates aren’t sealed.   

Our Toast is available from amazon & iTunes.