Turtle Skull fall into one of my favourite listening categories – soft psych, heavy rock. Perfect for whisking away moods, sending one into the stratosphere, and imparting good vibes. REZN, Papir, and Land Mammal are other great examples that deliver such blends, perfect matching soft harmonies versus righteous riffs. Being Here is Turtle Skull‘s second full-length album, following on from Monoliths and their self-titled EP, both of which I had the pleasure of reviewing and soaking myself in over the last few years.
Being Here is an interesting album in the way it is laid out, especially looking at their previous work. Turtle Skull EP was front-to-back ‘Flower Doom’, their aptly coined heavy psych doom blended with flowery vocals. Lyrics floated on the wind towards you, whilst the thundering storm rolled docitly in the background. That’s what made me fall in love with the band’s unique sound. Monoliths added more direct messaging in the lyrics, pushing some songs into a more traditional format. However, you got a lot of the EP’s flavours in those tracks, with large rambling sections taking the listener on a journey.
Their newest begins with a nice blend of the styles from the EP and Monoliths, before diving deeper into the lyrically heavy tracks. In the middle, they introduce a new faster flavour to their sound, something more upbeat and intense, spawning tracks like “Heavy As Hell” and “It Starts With Me”. Finally, during the last two tracks, we see them winding back to more of the flavour of the EP, closing out with oodles of psych.
“Being Here” sets the tone of the album perfectly straight off the bat and introduces you to the band’s new best friend – noise. The wall of fuzzy psych that meets the listener from the get-go is huge, screaming with noisy guitars for nearly a minute before opening up and engaging other instruments and settling into a very Black Rebel Motorcycle Club groove. Turtle Skull cleverly add subtle layers to flesh out the sound of the track, and by the fourth minute, you’re soaking in esoteric bliss. Great vocal harmonies mixed with solid riffs and buildup leave this as easily one of the best on the record.
The second and third tracks of the album are brilliant reminders to put your phone away and get outside. “Apathy” reminds you to live outside of a screen and delivers the message with brilliant fuzz grooves paired with some really cool ’60s/’70s keys to amplify the psych. The vocal hooks in verses and choruses are really well-executed too. “Into The Sun” is all about getting outside, getting back to the roots of existence; for the first half, it is one of my favourite tracks.
Yet, having had this album playing from every speaker I own for the last two months, I think they made a grave mistake and didn’t test the sheer levels of noise they introduced in this track, or its effect on people. The track is exceptionally chill for the first two minutes, begins to ramp up in intensity, then drops back to a standard Turtle Skull psychy beat. At that point, this shrill screech comes in from an instrument unknown and goes up, and down, and up, and down in pitch for well over a minute. Five different friends or family members asked me to turn the music down or skip the track when I had it on, justifying my thoughts that it was unnecessary. If that noise wasn’t there, it would be hands down one of the best tracks on the album, with the crescendo it leads into a really choice bit of psych.
The middle three tracks are cool, yet as I reach the other side of the album cycle (I religiously listen front to back), they are certainly for more gritty days, rather than the days you want flowery psych rock permeating the rooms of your house. Nowadays, I’m often skipping 4-6 and jumping back into the tracks where the band’s unique selling points shine through. “Modern Mess” is a utopia after those three tracks, soaking you in downtempo desert-psych straight off the bat. The vocals pair delightfully with the wistful guitars behind them, creating images of sun-soaked Australian evenings, having a mellow BBQ with your mates. The band deliver a masterclass in layering in the track too, building up the fuzz before taking it back down to the levels of the delicate opening.
I’ll champion bands trying something new, even if it doesn’t always work. Better to strive for new, unique flavours than wallow in unvarying sound. Yet I feel, having listened back to their EP and Monoliths whilst writing this up, they are straying further from their very own original concept – flower doom – and towards being a more conventional psych-pop-rock band. The EP and Monoliths feel more transcendental and heavy, because they have a formula and it works damn well. The music had better pacing, better atmosphere.
Being Here feels like they’ve tried to reinvent the wheel, sticking three new ones on the car and keeping the original for good measure. Their line-up changes and decision to self-produce and mix the record are likely the key reasons for this. That being said, I do still thoroughly enjoy the tracks where the reinvention has worked, or they blend enough of their flower doom in. Turtle Skull needs to make the trip to Europe as soon as possible. There is a wide open market for them over here, with many punters screaming out for lighter, more accessible heavy-psych-rock and doom.
