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Apr 4, 2018 | Record Collector - Midway through the third track here, Mystery Train, with its hurdy-gurdy organs and frenetically busy drumming, it hits us that there’s some parallel universe where Kentish garage pysch-popsters The Galileo 7 aren’t a 21st Century construct named after a classic Star Trek episode but are genuine 60’s stars who’ve made the transition from mop-tops to psychedelia are are goofily running around the wacky plots of their own TV series.Issued late last year and justifiably repromoted for the US market, this record is a simply exhausting, no-pause-for-breath, no-space-spared affair. It’s a full-on swirl of guitars, organs and mellotron across which drummer Mole trashes everything in sight, getting into every nook or cranny of their sound and filling them in such a way that would make Clem Burke or Rat Scabies, or yes – inevitable comparison coming right up, Keith Moon – seem positively restrained.
If anything, it’s a summation built from collective memory, the bits of the psychedelic 60’s and the power pop of its 70’s comedown that we recall in kaleidoscopic vibrancy but probably wasn’t quite like this. Not a pastiche, but everything we want a past era to have been: colourful, madcap, thrilling, and quite some trip.
Ian Abrahams
