SUNBURNED “The Pegadrift” (Fuck It Tapes)

FIT follows up its stunning archival NNCK tape with another chunk of historical audio by a similarly canonized New York psych institution, Sunburned (Hand of the Man). “The Pegadrift” collects a quartet of recordings from the fall of 2005, many (all?) of which document sets from the Sunburned/Magik Markers US tour. They played LA/The Smell on this trek and I recall a hairy guy dropping his pants and hitting a keyboard with his dick, which weirded out the bulk of the under-21 all-ages punk youths there so much that they left, leaving SBHOTM to play their half-hour of jams to roughly 9 people. Fortunately this CS finds them in slightly less confrontational form, and the editing/clothing helps immensely. The A side track, “Horse Country Blues,” is a great, condensed, overtly musical organic psych rhythm slipstream, drums and guitar mantras pounding in runic unison. They start the B side with a muddled/muddy hippy spoken word piece that goes on for waaaaaay too long but eventually it ends and Moloney revs up the drums into a brambly drunken groove, which motors the proceedings to a better place. Momentarily. Then Rob Thomas gets BACK on the mic and spits out more incoherent stream-of-consciousness beatnik babble until the C30 runs out of tape. Love it or hate it, this is what Sunburned is: a sweaty, ragged, intoxicated stink of open mouths and burned minds. Smoke on or sober up.