Turn in, tune out and drop off.

“IDLTRY [aɪ’dɔltrɪ] is a Moscow based indie/psychedelic band led by Lev Vasilets. Their debut 4-piece mini-album comes out sounding as if someone put pills of Lysergide under the tongues of the whole gang from “24 Hour Party People” and carried them to Woodstock in a time machine.”

That’s what the press release says, as well as stating that this music will appeal to “acid-rock fans of the 1960s in the manner of Hawkwind…”

No it won’t.

So we have IDLTRY, a Russian band singing in English, trying to appeal to acid rock fans of the 60’s? The result, their The Rite EP, is something that sounds like a Russian Eurovision entry: contrived, confused and without substance.

Take Celebrate for example. It starts off with a Bomb The Bass synth line that is so hackneyed and cliched it beggars belief. This heavy throbbing soft synth pulsates over an AppleMac dry disco beat. Are you getting the Eurovision picture? Well, at least with Eurovision it would seem like competitive suicide to choose to sing in English but not let your entry allow us English-speaking folk to understand the words. Not so here. The singer smears his words in such a way that our English speaking brains clutch at odd syllables and force us to make up our own words. So we hear lines like: ‘within tag any shape’ or ‘all the speed is last night‘. You can’t make it up.

Occasionally you do hear something which you can understand, something deep and profound and obviously Lysergide inspired. Yes, it’s Shaun Ryder meets Hawkwind my pschedelic brethren. We get: ‘through the wild where the secrets will be kept’ and a couple of lines of: ‘I’ll show you things you’ve never seen‘. Unfortunately, this is a complete lie: there is nothing here that we haven’t seen before. And, while it might just be the nostalgia talking, it looked a lot better before.

In the late 60’s and 70’s, German bands created the counter-culture movement and sounds of Kosmische Musik or Krautrock as it became known, and yeah, here in English speaking Britain we had Hawkwind. Inevitably there were some bands like Eloy and Jane that couldn’t let go of the Anglo-American sounds that dominated pop music at the time. They sang in English and diluted and westernised the idea of what Krautrock was actually supposed to be. The result was a cheesy Pink Floyd-ish sound, more Barclay James Harvest than Can. People don’t talk about Eloy and Jane anymore.

If this is Russian psychedelia then burn before reading.