Review & Full Album Premiere: Lammping, Flashjacks
Posted in audiObelisk, Reviews on August 19th, 2021 by JJ Koczan
[Click play above to stream Lammping’s Flashjacks in full. Album is out digitally on Aug. 27 with vinyl to follow Sept. 17 on Echodelick Records.]
There is a marked element of studio experimentation throughout Lammping‘s self-produced second full-length, Flashjacks. Also their label debut for Echodelick Records, the Toronto outfit formed by songwriter Mikhail Galkin (vocals, guitar, etc.) and drummer Jay Anderson — plus Matthew Aldred on backing vocals and Scott Hannigan on bass — show this immediately on opening cut “Intercessor,” beginning with a swirling-up-from-the-past echoing sample that speaks to the purported nostalgic sensibility one also sees mirrored in the cover art.
This ‘looking back’ of course has some effect on the mood of the album overall, but as Lammping follow-up Aug. 2020’s righteous Bad Boys of Comedy (review here), which was released by Nasoni Records, these 10 songs across just 33 minutes (read: short songs) use classic ideas as a means to move forward by digging deeper into their sound. Samples, drum machines, varying arrangements of fuzz guitar and bass — the latter of which is positively, gloriously farty on “Jaws of Life,” though whether that’s Galkin or Hannigan playing, I’m not sure — and various effects manipulations result in stretches, like the vocal drone that backs closer “Other Shoe” for its first minute-plus and returns again in its last minute as well, thereby speaking both to the band and Galkin as the main composer following whims of what works in the material as well as thinking in larger terms about the structure of the whole song and, indeed, album.
Flashjacks never repeats itself any more than it wants to, but its choruses are infectious beginning with “Intercessor,” which takes an Om-style tantric ride cymbal for a different kind of meditative trip, abidingly and unflinchingly mellow, like you played your 45 at 33RPM and decided it sounded better that way. It’s a nigh-on-perfect launch for a record full of ready departures from one inclusion to the next, capping with drifting keys and handclaps that foreshadow some of the more funk and soul-derived aspects that come later in pieces like the eponymous “Lammping,” “Jaws of Life” and “The Funkiest.”
The latter two of those — “Jaws of Life” and “The Funkiest” — were featured on earlier 2021’s New Jaws EP (review here), along with “Neverbeen,” the penultimate interlude “Big Time the Big Boss” and “Other Shoe,” and they make up the bulk of side B together, save for “Neverbeen,” which swaps with “Cleaning Up,” the sorry-we-can’t-have-drums-here-they-already-melted progression of which serves as a tie-in with second track “Heartland Rock,” which is more straightforward in structure, perhaps, but which, by the time it lets go into the solo that rounds out about the last 30 seconds (before it cuts to static) of its total 2:13, has already crafted its own idyllic portrait.
There’s a duality of purpose throughout Flashjacks that’s maybe easier to read into the proceedings in part because of some of the material being previously released on its own — and it’s all Lammping, to be sure — but “New October” emphasizes the ultra-laid-back dreamed-out fluidity that coincides with the funk to come on side B that’s prefaced with the transition from the swirling guitar noodling of “Neverbeen” into “Lammping” itself, which is more rhythmically forward, groovier, and, just for a verse or two, playfully makes it hard to tell whether Lammping are drawing influence from ’70s funk or the ’90s hip-hop that sampled it, the chorus, guitar solo, bass and drums all tapping into a flow that’s timeless in its cool, however anchored in odd-numbered decades of yore it may be.
Galkin and Anderson shift back and forth throughout the record, and their sonic persona becomes one more aspect of craft that’s a toy to be molded and shaped as they will, as songs like “Neverbeen” solos out a sub-three-minute stretch of nostalgic yearning and “Cleaning Up” pulls away from the roll of “The Funkiest” for a less tangible psychedelic foray ahead of the effects-laced organ on “Big Time the Big Boss.”
Thus, Lammping‘s sound is not a settled issue, and if “Heartland Rock” and “New October” and “Cleaning Up” are newer, they may indicate some further push into experimentalism to come, but it’s been a year since their debut, so however quickly they may or may not continue to work, they’re still just getting started. Given the underlying clarity and efficiency of their songwriting — and even the placement “Intercessor,” “Jaws of Life” and “Other Shoe” as the side A opener, side B opener and finale, respectively, as the only pieces over four minutes long and anchors around which the other material winds and currents — and the way in which these tracks speak to each other, Flashjacks builds on what the band accomplished with Bad Boys of Comedy and speaks to the longer-term potential of the group.
Maybe it’s ironic that a record geared toward examination of a past — an imagined one? certainly “Neverbeen” seems to remind without saying a word that most nostalgia is false nostalgia, though its title could just as easily be derived from “has-been,” so who knows — should entice one to look ahead and think of what a group might do in the future, but ultimately, Lammping‘s strengths are here, in the present as well. The home-studio intimacy of their experimentalism is nothing if not of-the-moment, as is the willful escapism of their trance-inducing, headphone-ready psychedelia and aural detail and depth. And their fun, which is no less their own than anything else they offer across these songs. Flashjacks, the word which no doubt is some kind of grew-up-in-this-time-and-place reference, is good vibes through and through, even as “Other Shoe” leaves off with its last strum to a few seconds of ominous silence.
And maybe that other shoe will drop their next time out, and will that be in a year, two, three? What will the songs sound like? What will the world be like? Where are we going and who the hell are we anyway? These questions are exactly the kind of needless bullshit Lammping help you leave behind while you listen, and if you want to complain about something, complain the fact that Flashjacks only offers 33 minutes of that utterly necessary serenity. It’s okay. It’s gonna be okay. Just let it be okay. You’re alright.
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