The Pink Snowflakes
Sun Chasing
Rating: 3.0
Label: Lick-able Sunshine Records
Portland, Oregon’s Pink Snowflakes like to playfully splash around in the same channels of sugary acid that groups like Strawberry Alarm Clock or the Lemon Pipers rowed through Willy Wonka-style in the late ’60s. But those bands were somewhat calculated, having adopted their hard candy shell in the hopes of cashing in on a zeitgeist as seen through the eyes of middle-aged producers; 40 years back in Portland a band called the Weeds was forced by their record company to change their name to The Lollipop Shoppe. This name, paired with the angsty songwriting of future Dead Moon soldier, Fred Cole, comes off as an ironic juxtaposition which is the corner of the starlight mint galaxy where the Pink Snowflakes exist.
Make no mistake though, Cole’s sinewy punk pleas are lean and straightforward compared to the Snowflakes’ excursions into space aboard the S.S. Echoplex but there is a sardonicism the two share. In “Caves!!!!,” singer/guitarist Andrew Rossi throws out, almost as an aside, “Hey, that’s a nasty sunburn/ All your skin is gone,” which is emblematic of the psychedelic world created and inhabited by the Snowflakes; everything is horrifying and everything is beautiful. There are no Syd Barret gnomes or Jim Morrison-style orgies of dark delight, but rather indelible and unintended reality-tampering changes that sound as if they’re just rolling off Rossi’s back.
It should be underlined here that these guys are doing pop songs in a sharp, whacked-out psych relief; they are not on the other side of the psych-rock spectrum, where volume and sustained guitars or themes equal mind-alteration and temporal displacement. The Pink Snowflakes sensibility tends toward the melodies and reverberation of early Flaming Lips, dosed with the slightest amount of Comets on Fire’s kitchen-sink sonic philosophy that informed their first record. Sun Chasing ebbs and flows organically, with striking elements rising out of the sonic sludge (the Status Quo-like riff on “Like Ice Cream” or the abrupt melodic chorus change appearing in the middle of the ’80s Sonic Youth onslaught of “Closest Thing to Paralyze”) only to disappear again.
This is a double-edged sword for Sun Chasing, your attention span drops off during a spacey passage in the eight minute “Circus Formed the Last Window With Birds” only to be arrested again by a bizarre change like the shift to fractured folk in “It Was the Apples.” There is certainly a degree of consciousness transportation here. However, Ross Skolmsvold’s lo-fi production packs all the sound in so tight that it often sounds monochromatic. One’s mind can’t help but be transported elsewhere to a state of “Hey, did I leave the lights on upstairs?”
It’s an arguably tenuous complaint for a psych-rock band to be “too spacey,” so I say, “Good job.” I would love to hear what you can do with a better studio. I think they have better songs to be written than those on Sun Chasing and they deserve to be laid down in a space that can make a final recording as interesting as the sweeping, gurgling guitar effects or the twisted story songs. It could mean the difference between Nestle and that 80% cocoa stuff you get at Whole Foods.
by Chris Middleman
