Michael Hann 

Fixers: We’ll Be the Moon – review

Fixers' modern take on psychedelia owes perhaps a little too much to Brian Wilson, but this is nevertheless a terrific album, writes Michael Hann
  
  


After a couple of years of generating excitement with a series of EPs and singles, Fixers have emerged with an album that can be bracketed with Django Django's debut as proof that psychedelia need not be an exercise in retro genre pastiche. Fixers' role model is the Brian Wilson of the late 60s, but unlike most Wilson fetishists, they realise his greatness lay not just in lush, layered harmonies, but in marrying avant-garde impulses to commercial pop. And so Pink Light, with its sequenced keyboards and 4/4 beat, barrels along in Radio 1-friendly fashion, and Crystals puts a near-Hi NRG pulse at its centre. On occasion, it's a little too Wilsonian – no matter how glorious Iron Deer Dream is, its organ coda will have you singing "God only knows what I'd be without you," over the top – but such is the quality of We'll Be the Moon that it can be forgiven as a knowing nod rather than craven cribbing.

 

Leave a Comment

Required fields are marked *

*

*