Rewind.

Last Thurs­day night was long and wavy. Neo-psych — call it freak­folk, call it noise, call it a shoegaze revival — is plentiful…and cova­lent. Now Espers is tour­ing with Stere­o­lab, Dun­gen remix­es Mia Doi Todd and it’s clear that some­thing’s hap­pen­ing. Whether or not this is just a pass­ing trend in a sub­cul­tur­al ghet­to remains to be seen, but the mass cul­tur­al mind­fuck has been dis­tilled into ambiva­lent, gauzy polyrhythms and aching guitars.

For all the wish­ful think­ing and Greg Tate cum Todd Gitlin nos­tal­gia for more polit­i­cal times and dire telos, the post-colo­nial peri­od fol­low­ing World War II pro­duced more fuzzy sen­ti­ments about the world at large than some would have you believe. Wood­stock was a one-off: inex­pen­sive polit­i­cal grand­stand­ing for a war that would­n’t end for years. Three years into Iraq with almost five years spent in Afghanistan, buzzing, dron­ing noise, slash­ing met­al and inad­ver­tent tape slip­pages make an apo­lit­i­cal col­lage with many meanings.

Sud­den­ly inter­na­tion­al psy­che­delia fills the void cul­ti­vat­ed by neo­con klap­trap — the emp­ty “sup­port the troops” non­sense pro­mul­gat­ed by know-noth­ings like 3 Doors Down along with Kel­ly Clark­son’s mar­ketable poignan­cy. “Because of You” does­n’t only sound like a pained long­ing for a lost child­hood, but some cryp­to-syl­lo­gism for sift­ing through the emo­tion­al dis­tress of loos­ing a loved one. Instead, psych rock and coke rap offer con­tra­dic­tions and con­fu­sion instead of easy answers tied in yel­low rib­bons bond­ed by magnets.

It’s some­how fit­ting that cars would be adorned with polit­i­cal mes­sages when they them­selves, in Detroit and in Iraq, Afghanistan and Venezuela, have become polit­i­cal mes­sages too.

Psy­chic Ills — “Inau­ra­tion”