LA based band Mystic Braves have a song on their 2014 album Desert Island called In The Past (*) where the lyrics indicate that it might not be a good idea to live there. This is a supreme irony because it's difficult to think of an example of a group that does that so utterly for almost every single moment of their recorded ouput and every time they choose to get dressed or get a new haircut. A land that time forgot. A place where the sixties never succumb to the seventies or more precisely where 1967 never turns to 1968. Perhaps the solitary week where Incense & Peppermints by The Strawberry Alarm Clock rested in the American Billboard Singles Number One slot. Where almost everything seemed possible to those who believed or alternatively, depending on how you choose to look at it, the moment where the dream curdled and began to die as opportunists and bandwagon jumpers gatecrashed the party.
Closest in spirit to California contemporaries the Allah Las or The Growlers both of whom I've written about on here, but there are lots and lots of American bands on this particular trip at the moment. If you were feeling damning you could write off Mystic Braves utterly as period fetishists but it has to be said that they do what they choose to do very well indeed and are clearly loving every moment and that matters. Although their album from last year Days of Yesteryear is perhaps a touch too polished, and is such a eulogy to the bands and records that came out from that state in that particular year that it verges on the comic at some points.
Desert Island though is a little more frayed and a little more obviously under the particular spell of Texas based legends The13th Floor Elevators which gives the album an edge its successor rather lacks. It seems a little harsh to discount them entirely because if you like this stuff, and I definitely do, their records are a distinctly pleasurable experience to listen to. They're at their best when they allow themselves to get loose, Desert Island utilises some mariachi brass that gives the songs it appears on the required sense of abandon to take them off the rails and somewhere else. There's definitely an argument to be made that they do what they do so well on occasion that they almost transcend criticism:
'The Mystic Braves are a five-piece out of Los Angeles who are so thoroughly in love with the twangy, farfisa-inflected, hippie-trippy music of the 1960s that they play it a hell of a lot better than many of the bands who were actually there at the time. To put it another way: they don’t play psychedelic 1960s rock the way it was, so much as the way we remember it being.'
As another song appears and you're become momentarily convinced it's heading into a full throttled cover of The House of the Rising Sun, You're Gonna Miss Me or Pushin' Too Hard, and then pulls back at the last minute to show itself as another of the bands own compositions, though never quite entirely their own, you have to entertain the idea that perhaps some other ingredients in the mix might be an idea. The Rain Parade were trying to pull off a similar trick way back in 1983 and were mocked by many in the UK at least as sheer pastiche but Mystery Braves are a slightly sleeker, though less inspired proposition. It can get a bit samey on occasion but when they get it right, as I think they do on the songs posted here, you have to doff your cap to them. As I said, I'd recommend Desert Island over Days of Yesteryear if you choose to opt for either. Far out! Though not so far out that you won't be able to find your way back home again!
* Since writing this I've discovered that In The Past is a cover of a Chocolate Watchband song.
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