For the better part of the last 15 years, the duo of Max Dameron (guit/vox) and Sam Ford (drums/vox) have been too weird and too wild for this lame-ass planet. After enjoying vagabond stints living in Portland, Los Angeles, and Brooklyn, they now call Detroit home. Here they rebuild, out of the scraps and wreckage of the 21st century, something which casts aside any rules or adherence to banal tropes.
Specializing in the unexpected, Max and Sam have wrought an individual sound that's as much post-Melvins sludge punk as it is futurist prog metal. Their self-titled debut, recorded in 2022 at High-Bias in Detroit, puts on display the fruits of their metamorphosis.
From the soaring triumphal fuzz of 'Uncanny Valley' or the sweep and thrust of 'House Of Butterflies' their craft is precise, they're just making up their own shapes to sculpt. Times change and artists mature: now under the name Psychic Trash, Ford and Dameron come to Riding Easy Records as veterans turning a fresh page, reinvigorated at the prospect of forging a new path and the beneficiaries of about a decade and a half's slog through the underground.
Psychic Trash's self-titled debut is unmistakably uncompromising, a little theatrical, intermittently manic, and deceptively broad in style for just how much punk rests beneath.
For fans of Melvins, Boris, Big Business, Mr Bungle... noise rock.