Lammping / Drew Smith / Marker Starling - Risky [LP]

Toronto's shape-shifting psych project LAMMPING continues it's ambitious four-album series with the upcoming LP - a lush, immersive collaboration between Drew Smith (Dr. Ew, The Bicycles) and Chris Cummings (Marker Starling). The record follows Never Never, Lammping's acclaimed joint effort with Bloodshot Bill, and finds producer Mikhail Galkin (a.k.a. DJ Alibi) and drummer Jay Anderson exploring a different corner of the project's expanding sonic universe.Where Never Never mashed up boom-bap beats and rockabilly psych, the new album drifts into deeper, more melodic territory - "CSNY harmonies over early-'90s hip-hop drums, fuzzed-out guitars, and synth textures," as Galkin describes it. The result feels both strange and familiar: a warm, analog dream slowly unraveling in real time. "It started out as a pretty, almost yacht rock record," says Galkin. "But the more we recorded, the darker and heavier it got - it's like a heavy-psyched out yacht rock album, if the yacht was sinking the whole time."The album's influences reach far beyond rock and hip-hop, pulling inspiration from '60s and '70s vocal jazz (Ahmad Jamal's The Bright, The Blue and the Beautiful, Duke Pearson's How Insensitive) and psychedelic pop (Spanky and Our Gang). The result is something Chris Cummings calls "a pocket universe of it's own - emotional but focused, like a dream sequence that knows exactly where it's going."As with Never Never, the record also features interlude-style instrumental remixes that thread the album together, blurring the line between studio experiment and concept piece. It's a testament to Lammping's evolution from psych-rock origins to full-blown production duo - where genre lines dissolve and everything, somehow, still sounds like Lammping.