Cut it with some ‘Stawberry Jam’: Being Dead discuss the perfect album to accompany a bad acid trip
If you needed a suitable soundtrack to drop the lysergic acid diethylamide you’ve kept in the freezer or the baggie of liberty caps picked from your trip to the Welsh countryside last autumn—yes, they’re still good—then you’d do a lot worse than dust off Being Dead‘s sophomore effort EELS from last year.
Possessed with the spirit of The Beach Boys’ lo-fi slacker collage of Smiley Smile, EELS hazily wanders across an intriguing mosaic of disparate musical flavours and hues, from dusky folk numbers to stirring indie rock, all held together in Being Dead’s colourful aural plume, dancing between bright levity and ruminative shadows.
Centred around the core duo of Texans Falcon Bitch and Schmoofy, with Ricky Motto joining them on stage for bass duties, legend has it they met on a large schooner as part of a pasta-tasting tour of the Pacific. While at sea, they allegedly recorded several albums worth of material before a feud with the onboard captain, losing all the audio in the messy, litigious wrangle with the disgruntled skipper.
Buckets of salt may be required with Being Dead’s founding narrative, but the fanciful lore of their inception illustrates the wry humour that courses throughout their evocative garage rock. They’re also reliable experts on hallucinogenic damage control. Catching up with Being Dead last year, Schmoofy divulged his trauma of an acid trip that went swiftly south, and the life-line one album, in particular, threw his way.
“It’s the first one that I heard of theirs,” Schmoofy revealed, “And I was kind of late to the game. I heard it when I was, like, 22 or something like that.”
He added: “I was having one of the worst trips of my entire life… And I felt like I was being chased in a jungle. And then I woke up the next day and I said, ‘Well, that was kind of a cool sound.’ Listening to it again, I was like, ‘Oh, this album fucking rocks.’ Then I just got obsessed with Animal Collective in general. But Strawberry Jam, that one’s always the best one.”
It’s a curious pick. Animal Collective’s seventh LP isn’t known for its soothing energy. Its front cover displays effectively the warped and smushed psychedelic pop contained within, a splattered strawberry flashing warnings like a wasp’s black and yellow hazard signs.
Speaking on a podcast near the release of 2007’s Strawberry Jam, singer and drummer Panda Bear offered an insight into the record’s gelatinous bite: “Something that’s really synthetic and sharp and futuristic looking,” he said, “Tangy and sweet, almost in a kind of aggressive way in terms of the way it tastes.”
However, its hectic arrangements and busy sonic travel may provide a skewed distraction from a bad acid trip’s reality-ripping rollercoaster. Offering a piece of counterintuitive advice, it may be the next time you’re freaking out after one too many 2C-Bs and worried the urban legend of tripping so hard you think you’ll turn into a milkshake may become a terrible reality, an album that’s “really hardcore” and “kind of scary” according to Schmoofy may be crazy enough to work.
