Cosmos Inside (Trail Records 015, 2014)
Cosmos Insidee is another tasty offering from psychedelic music specialists Trail Records. Polska Radio One is a young Russian band from Yekaterinburg in the Urals. Yekaterinburg is the fourth-largest city in Russia, located in a mining region, hundreds of kilometers east of Moscow.
Although Polska Radio One started as a garage band, it flourished into one of the finest psychedelic music acts in Eastern Europe. The group plays a mix of vocal and instrumental pieces with plenty of reverb and distorted guitars, electric tempura (a type of lute) and organ. Although keyboardist Andrei Golubev occasionally uses a synthesizer, the primary keyboard sound is the electric organ, with a vintage sound that takes you to late 1960s-early 1970s psychedelia and primitive and Echoes-era Pink Floyd.
Unlike psychedelic jam bands who are known for their solos and jazzy or bluesy improvisations, Polska Radio One are more interested in the dreamy aspect of psychedelia, with barely any solos. Sitar is added in two pieces, ‘Time Eternity’ and bonus track ‘Rhymes and Armonies.’ This south Asian instrument adds an exotic world music element and a further tie to the late 1960s when The Beatles and many other musicians connected with Ravi Shankar and the mesmerizing sounds coming from India.
The band includes Dmitry Kutniakov on guitar, vocals, keyboards; Alexander Naumov on electric tempura; Andrei Golubev on keyboards, bass; Feodor Sanatin on drums, keyboards; and Stepan Jee on sitar.
Polska Radio One delivers a splendid album full of vintage electric atmospheres and hypnotic psychedelia.
Buy Cosmos Inside