New York-based La Big Vic just dropped a game-changing debut. We got a taste of what the group’s been cookin’ with various tracks that have trickled in over the past year, but the whole of the eight-song, 45-minute Actually is simply breathtaking. Describing an album as “uncategorizable” or as an amalgam of multiple genres is just not an interesting description anymore, and one that does no justice to this kind of record. You hear a little of the fluid, utopian soundscapes of Talk Talk and Bark Psychosis, as well as occasional vocoder-heavy galactic shag grooves a la Air peppered throughout. But the comparisons pretty much end there.

La Big Vic has written and recorded a body of songs that are essentially pop music, yet bear no sonic resemblance to anything remotely pop. Actually plays like a dream, conjuring fragments of familiar songs jumbled and skewed into something both bizarre and comforting. “LYNY” sounds like an anthemic sing-along as you’d hear it exiting the deepest of REM cycles. Next up is “Heyo (Silver Morning),” a song that, melodically, feels like an old electric folk tune warped through some cosmic wormhole floating over a driving, colossally reverberated apache beat sinister enough to evoke the sound of God when he’s come back to earth to kill Republicans. The result is a lush and, at the sake of being corny, spiritual shimmering space pop meditation.

Kosmische instrumentals “Chinese Wedding” and “Bobka Chocka” are equally as engaging as the more structured pieces. The former dabbles heavy in improv, fluttering electronic washes, and violin shredding, almost resembling Spiritualized at their most otherworldly, while the latter acts as the closest thing to Neu ’11, if that could ever exist in an alternate timeline (paging Dr. Brown…). Actuallly shuts down shop with “Musica” – a vast, slow-burning, gorgeous 10-minute epic that provides equal time to freewheeling post-rock and mystic vocal melodies, giving you a damn near perfect ‘to be continued’ for whatever the group has in store next. Again, these descriptions are simply reference points that a music writer must employ. To wit, La Big Vic is an unequivocally fresh musical experience that must be heard.

Besides offering a musically blurred take on psychedelia, La Big Vic truly packs an emotional punch that anymore seems to be completely lost in the mind-bending underground. Everyone, like, forgot how to not be so fucking blase and dejected these days. And that’s what makes this debut such an urgent work. Actually clearly comes across as an album built with a rare love and care, replete with acute sonic detail, radiant textures, and a warmth rarely found in Zodiak-appropriate electronic music. A phenomenal record across the board. Game changed.

Actually is available on wax right now via the fine folks at Underwater Peoples.

For fans of:  Cloudland Canyon, Talk Talk, Faust

MP3 :::
La Big Vic – Heyo (Silver Morning)