Considered in biological terms, psychedelia has spent the last 50 years behaving like a pernicious virus with a handy penchant for mutation. What may have seemed like limited outbreaks in conditions favourable to growth – eg, the UFO Club in London, the Grateful Dead’s house in San Francisco – rapidly manifested in an astounding plethora of locations. Countries as diverse as Brazil, Turkey, Germany, Japan and Nigeria were soon wracked with fervid demonstrations of wah-wah-enhanced freakiness and endorsements for mind expansion. Resurgences continue to occur in an unpredictable variety of locations, which goes to explain how plausible it is for 2019’s first essential psych album to have been created by a Mexican couple working in Ensenada, a laid-back beach city on the surfer-friendly peninsula of Baja California. Evidently, nowhere is safe from contagion.

Listeners who have no problem with that fact will be thrilled with De Facto, the fifth and most consistently enthralling album thus far by Lorelle Meets The Obsolete. Having started the project while the two were playing together in a band called Soho Riots in Guadalajara, Lorena Quintanilla and Alberto González highlighted the initially casual nature of their joint endeavour by naming themselves after a pair of TV-show-inspired jokes – Quintanilla’s handle is Lorelle is a nod to “Rochelle, Rochelle”, a phony movie mentioned in a Seinfeld episode, while González borrowed his moniker from The Twilight Zone.

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The band became a more serious concern as part of Mexico City’s small but bustling psych scene. The sludgy, surly sound of Lorelle Meets The Obsolete’s first three albums – 2011’s On Welfare, 2013’s Corruptible Faces and 2014’s Chambers – reflect the more harried circumstances of their lives in the Mexican capital, as well as their frustration with their overly rushed recording processes. Nevertheless, the duo gradually garnered the attention of heads elsewhere in the world, especially when one of their musical godheads, Peter “Sonic Boom” Kember, conferred his approval by mixing and mastering Chambers.

Their first since moving out to the coast and adapting to more relaxed circumstances, 2016’s Balance marked a considerable leap in terms of sophistication. Still smothered in effects, Quintanilla’s murmurings in Spanish and English now evoked Bilinda Butcher’s blurred-out voice on MBV’s Loveless and the eerie beauty of the late Trish Keenan of Broadcast.

Alternately bruising and beatific (and often in rapid succession), De Facto marks another advance. One reason for that is their approach to building up the songs in their home studio, newly built with the help of their touring synthesizer player José Orozoco Mora (he also plays on the album along with two other members of the live band, bassist Fernando Nuti and drummer Andrea Davi). Songs first evolved as drones and grooves, with the guitars added only late in the process. Even so, effects pedals have not gone neglected. “Inundación” may open as a sleepy dirge but the reverb-swathed vocals and dreamy layers of synth are soon battered by riffs and squalls. Likewise, the oscillating synth tone that ripples through “Resistir” is no match for a barrage worthy of My Bloody Valentine. Elsewhere – as on the menacing opener “Ana” or the sultrier “Acción – Vaciar” – the keyboards successfully fend 
off the attacks.

As pretty and lush as De Facto’s gentler moments can be, even they contain darker undercurrents. That said, the precise meanings of Quintanilla’s lyrics may escape English speakers since this is the first album sung entirely in the band’s native tongue. Quintanilla explains that the decision was prompted largely by a need for comfort in troubling times, what with the increase of political and social turmoil in Mexico in response to Trump’s demonisation of America’s southerly neighbour. As a result, the uneasy mood of De Facto feels very much of a piece with Low’s Double Negative and Yo La Tengo’s There’s A Riot Going On, especially in regards to the two songs that stretch to the 10-minute mark. In “Unificado”, a fetching acid-folk fragment is subsumed in a roaring maelstrom of feedback and distortion. The album’s closer, the gentler “La Maga” manages to retain its shape despite its more turbulent elements.

Such moments also highlight an irony of psychedelia’s perpetual process of mutation. Their minds freshly expanded, the genre’s original progenitors now seem rather more idealistic than their stylistic descendants. Sounds that were distended and distorted to convey a sense of liberation have become a means of expressing keenly felt anxieties, thereby mirroring the increasingly surreal and sinister nature of our daily lives no matter where we try to find refuge.

The March 2019 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – with Leonard Cohen on the cover. Inside, you’ll find David Bowie, Bob Marley, The Yardbirds, Lambchop, Jessica Pratt, Crass, Neu!, Sean Ono Lennon and much more. Our 15-track CD also showcases the best of the month’s new music, including Cass McCombs, Sleaford Mods, Julia Jacklin and Royal Trux.

“Django was truly a composer who imagined a composition down to its smallest detail,” said his long-time collaborator, violinist Stéphane Grappelli, reflecting on the many abilities of guitarist Django Reinhardt. Indeed, calling Reinhardt merely a guitarist seems, somehow, to undersell his artistry. During their time together, in Le Quintette Du Hot Club De France, Reinhardt and Grappelli would pioneer ‘gypsy jazz’ and inveigle modernist developments from America – Reinhardt was listening to musicians such as Duke Ellington – into the French jazz scene. He’d also develop a particularly fluid approach to both improvisation and composition, something Diminishing Blackness maps out with great sensitivity and intelligence.

Much of the legend of Reinhardt rests on his triumph over adversity – more specifically, at the age of 18, surviving a caravan fire that left him bedridden for 18 months, and with minimal use of two fingers on his left hand, such that he would only be able to use his index and middle fingers to solo. While his rethinking of the guitar is fundamental to subsequent developments, he also helped shift the possibilities of soloing: his melodic improvisations moved the terrain forward from the tendency, among jazz guitarists, to work within chordal parameters.

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You can hear all of that develop through Diminishing Blackness – it’s a lovely set, opening with a clutch of songs from the Hot Club, whose continued reappearances across these three discs acts as a marker, of sorts, of where Reinhardt’s head was at, both compositionally, and while playing with others. Reinhardt’s guitar had astonishing facility and fluidity – he seems to skate or fly between notes, but never at the expense of the melodic logic he’s exploring over the Hot Club’s chord changes. The push-me-pull-you between Reinhardt and Grappelli is great to hear, too – to hear them soloing after one another on the Hot Club recordings from the late ’30s is a joy.

But it’s the improvisations, and the later recordings, that really beguile here. “Improvisation No 3” from 1943 winds circuitously around a clutch of chords, a dazzling tension building between Romany jazz and flamenco-esque trills; “Improvisation 47 (Improvisation No 5)”, from a 1947 radio broadcast, is delicate and devastating, the nuances in the exploration of melody as unexpected as they are compelling.

Some wonderful early-’50s material appears on the third disc, including a definitive take on “Nuages”, Reinhardt’s electric guitar tart and sharp, with decisive cut-offs; it’s an evocative take on the composition, where you can hear the entire arc of the piece within the first few notes. After this, Diminishing Blackness explores contextual material – recordings inspired by Reinhardt, from figures like Barney Wilen, 
Chet Atkins and Henri Crolla. It offers a space 
to reflect on just how Reinhardt’s singular playing transformed jazz.

The March 2019 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – with Leonard Cohen on the cover. Inside, you’ll find David Bowie, Bob Marley, The Yardbirds, Lambchop, Jessica Pratt, Crass, Neu!, Sean Ono Lennon and much more. Our 15-track CD also showcases the best of the month’s new music, including Cass McCombs, Sleaford Mods, Julia Jacklin and Royal Trux.