On their third album, Mind Control, British retromaniacs Uncle Acid & the Deadbeats play hook-soaked boogie-metal that looks back to the sludgey, fuzzy crunch of the early ’70s — think Deep Purple, Alice Cooper, Pentagram, Blüe Oyster Cult, and the funkier parts of Black Sabbath’s Paranoid. They built a legion of devotees thanks to the orginally sparse release of their critically acclaimed 2011 Blood Lust — originally 300 copies on purple vinyl, 50 copies on black (you can currently snag a mint copy of the former for $260.82). They’ve returned with another set of hazy riffs and big hooks.
Writes SPIN’s Kory Grow in his round-up of contemporary retro-metal: “[T]he music on their third album, Mind Control, shows a broader vocabulary of anachronism. In addition to a few riffs very possibly pilfered from Tony Iommi’s rehearsal tapes, songs like the swinging desert blues of ‘Poison Apple’ and the jamming drones of ‘Follow the Leader’ seep psychedelia via Deep Purple-via-Nuggets organ work on the former, and coolly relaxing vocal melodies and twangy acoustic guitar on the latter…. [T]he record suggests the same sort of breezy cool that Josh Homme uses on his Desert Sessions series, but something, maybe Uncle Acid’s inherent Britishness, makes them sound more nostalgic, rather than like something new.”
Mind Control gets its North American release via Metal Blade on May 14, but you can hear the whole thing right now!
:audio=0:113419:playlist:Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats, Mind Control:
