A few days ago, I found a moment to breathe between chasing stories and lurking around the local venues. It’s a rare instance when I find myself not busy doing something or trying to ignore that I’m supposed to be doing something, so, seeking to make the most of it, I took myself down to my favorite lounge for a libation. I’m sitting in the back of one of the inner rooms of this plywood burrow they call a bar, trying to enjoy a high life in solitude when in comes my man Louie. He joins me in drinking alone, and soon enough we’re engaged in a conversation about what we’ve been listening to. I make him listen to a dozen German pop ballads from the 80s I’ve been digging lately, and he puts me onto a new psychedelic rock album.
The record was “Back of My Mind” by Fantastic Shams. Fantastic Shams is a four-piece powerhouse from my own backyard, the crumbling streets of Indianapolis. These dudes dropped their self-titled LP in 2023 and then immediately hit the road playing gigs all over Indiana. A quartet of diehard performers, and yet, in the last three years we haven’t had a new EP nor LP spin. Well, finally, we do. Eleven tracks of punk-infused psychedelic chaos with a metric ton of wailing guitar solos thrown in for good measure. It’s a firm reminder that, in its day, psychedelic rock was considered hard rock, a fact that is often overshadowed by the flower child image usually pasted onto the genre.
“Back of My Mind” is a fascinating lesson in the mating of psychedelic and punk rock. In some cases it’s as simple as a song being, by and large, a 60s psych tune, fast beat, amplifier overdrive set to ten, and a minor echo on the vocals, with a static-heavy guitar riff screeching in the back. Take “Custard Shoe,” for example. This song is pure Haight-Ashbury psychedelic rock if you ignore the guitar shredding in the back playing through a blown-out amp.
Then you have tunes like “Bianchi Celeste,” which brings to mind the post-punk revival of the 2000s. The arrangement is fast and jaunty; there’s a groove to the guitar and a sax wailing away to accent the beat. There’s something to “Bianchi Celeste” that separates it from the legions of garage-slop singles buzzing around the music scene, though. Maybe it’s the palm-muted rhythm guitar, or the marriage of sax and fast-paced snare, which is reminiscent of the work of the Sonics, or maybe even it’s the lead break we approach a minute and a half in where the guitar and saxophone begin doing battle; harmonic vocalization rises like a towering tsunami, and the drums become a rattling symphony of crash cymbals. Every time you think you have “Back of My Mind” clocked, it sneaks up behind you with a new implement of destruction clutched in its hands, ready to bash you in the skull to reshape your understanding of the album by force.
“Back of My Mind” is undoubtedly one for the psychonauts; squares need not apply. It’s the sort of thing that requires you to hole up in your secret tweaker pad with a sheet of acid, the lights turned low, and your speaker turned up to maximum capacity so that you can chew on the melodies and ripping guitars with no distractions whatsoever. We had to wait three years to get our hands on this record, but it was well worth it. We see here a richer version of what we’ve come to love about Fantastic Shams. Psychedelic and punk rock wed in unholy matrimony.
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