Gypsy Treasures Unearth Some Buried Goods

Gypsy Treasures’ new album Buried Goods is one of those name-your-price deals up at bandcamp. It’s minutely layered, eerily reverberating psychedelic vamps that wouldn’t be out of place on an Electric Prunes album, or the Vampyros Lesbos soundtrack, and they’re absolutely hypnotic. Aria Jalali, otherwise known as Railcars, accidentally rediscovered the album’s basic tracks stashed away in his loop pedal on a recent European tour, and realizing how good they were, decided to finish the project, which he’d begun six or seven years ago. He gets extra props for tagging this as “sample-free” – looks like he knows that the audience for this is serious purist stoner music fans.

Because these instrumentals are all built from loops, the catchy, vaguely Indian hooks run over and over again as bizarrely oscillating washes of sound move into and then out of the mix. The first track, Stray Dogs of Wroclaw, sets surfy Chicha Libre guitar over a simple bass hook and a million swirling feedback and reverb effects – the Ventures as done by Scratch Perry, maybe?

The second track, Four Horsemen was ostensibly recorded live: its distant, minimalistic Middle Eastern tinged menace reminds of Savage Republic. Tadpole Walks Home, true to its name, is a slippery, slinky groove pulsing along on a swooping fuzz bass lick and creepy, tinny pitch-bending guitar sonics. The last cut, Of Moorish Towns blends watery chorus-box guitars and gamelanesque effects over an echoey Godspeed You Black Emperor style dirgey backdrop. Good to see that along with the digital download, an analog version of the original 4-track recording is also available on cassette from Not Not Fun.

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