THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Simply checking the pedigrees (ex-Arab On Radar, Chinese Stars, Some Girls, Doomsday Student and Hot Nerdz) will only get you so far with Psychic Graveyard. With a manic output of four albums — Loud As Laughter, A Bluebird Vacation, Veins Feel Strange and now the brilliant Wilting — in nearly as many years, Psychic Graveyard make consistently thrilling and unsettled sonic artifacts for a world emptied out and flattened by a joyless, sociopathic mediascape.
But some things do stay consistent across their ruptured anti-aesthetic: Charles Ovett’s relentless workflow on the drums; the burbling sawtooth substructures, grimy lead synths, and deconstructed guitars supplied by Nathan Joyner and Paul Vieira; and, of course, vocalist Eric Paul’s many narrators and personas, who find form as ghosts howling from within the machine or as agitated surrealists living lives huddled in the grimmest of redoubts. On Wilting, once again a product of geographic dispersion (Providence and San Diego), the band invite the listener to peel back the pedigrees and fall headlong into their twitchy waking dream.
Start with the signel Your Smile Is A Hoax. “This Butthole Surfers bass guitar sounds awesome!” they say. “ Let’s put some synth and bass guitar together. That was the main impetus for creating this song — the craving for a fuzzed-out bass guitar. Over the years, we’ve realized that our songs are birthed in pairs. Your Smile Is A Hoax is the sister to another track off this album called Haunted By Your Bloodline.
“Both feature the use of two low-register instruments playing off of each other, with a higher synth note popping obnoxiously out of the mix. We feel as though it helps keep the chaos grounded. Those higher swirl elements come from a forgotten field recording of an ambulance passing by Nate’s house in San Diego. Lyrically, it fills in the listener on some of our experiences as an afflicted band in today’s world, traveling all over the place while we’re wounded, but somehow having a blast while we’re out there — bleeding everywhere.”