Various 6 Stringadelica TipWorld (UK)

So there I was smugly thinking that guitars in trance were dead; that 1200 Mics’ Mescaline had taken the whole thing as far as it could go, and that the global psychedelic consciousness had realised that if they wanted to lose it to hefty guitars then Iron Maiden’s entire back catalogue is buyable for pennies per album in your nearest second-hand vinyl shack. But then this came in and completely fucked with everything. Total Eclipse kick off with a version of Canned Heat’s On The Road, and while it sounds like the most unlikely, and most ill-judged, cover version ever, it works. Total Eclipse’s broken arpeggios lend a stellar quality to the shuffled, riff-based groove. The Melovskys pull a similar rabbit out of the hat with Purple Haze, possibly a hugely unnecessary cover version but it works well enough to get a smile on your face. Eat Static and Ed Ozric’s Chronic Horde is simply awesome; sent back from fifty years in the future, the cryogenically frozen Joe Satriani is going into convulsions over an automaton solid groove. A big welcome back to Manmademan, whose Contact The Living is right in keeping with their earlier, classic sound rather than the stripped down future disco of the more recent Flying Rhino output; beautiful, hardly-there, ephemeral morning stuff that moves you in the way only they can. Morphem’s Whooky’s Wha has been about a lot since release last summer, everything hangs together in such a way that it almost sounds like your dreaming it... yummy. Finally Psycraft’s A Song For You is sleazy post-goa copshow stuff – Hank Marvin Tastic. It looks like there’s legs still left in the old guitars-in-trance horse after all.