CD review – Pop/Drone/Pedals by The Hoa Hoa’s
Hoa Hoa's CD release party is Friday Dec. 4 at Silver Dollar
Often relegated to art lofts, house parties and vintage stores, Toronto’s psych scene inhabits a sphere more underground than many of its indie music counterparts. Granted, this may be inherently rooted in its aesthetic, a dreamy, droney quality best served with mushrooms. On their just released second album, Pop/Drone/Pedals, The Hoa Hoa’s prove that this doesn’t always have to be the case.
While the band does exercise many well-worn psychedelic tropes, it does so with a tightness and consistency that rescues it from the depths of cliché.
Take the opener, “Postcards” – breathy deadpan vocals, repetitive bass riffs and textured, shoegazey guitars combine to form a trance-inducing pop gem that wouldn’t sound out of place in early-’90s Manchester. And that seems to be the case on most of the album’s 13 tracks. The Hoa Hoa’s may have made their name relentlessly gigging around their Toronto, but their sound is firmly rooted in psych-leaning scenes of the past. At a brisk 1:33, “Intensity” displays an uncharacteristic punk rock swagger, while “Velocity (Downtown)” and “Grew Up On The Seeds” echo Anton Newcombe’s ability to craft canonical psych gems temporally removed from the actual canon.
Even when self-consciously referencing their spiritual progenitors, it sounds more like a paraphrase than a quote. Admittedly, the faux-British vocals are hard to sell at a Rancho headlining gig, but when a band can pull off ‘60s hooks as catchy as those found in “Feels So Good Inside” (the track most likely to be featured in a car commercial), it has license to look backwards (and sideways).
Pop/Drone/Pedals isn’t immune to the occasional misstep. “Waves”, the band’s lone attempt at straight-faced balladry, disrupts the flow of a very groove-based album and a frontloaded tracklist causes it to drag a bit towards the end. But taken as a whole, P/D/P is a solid, varied piece of psych-pop that acts as a worthy successor to the Hoa Hoa’s debut, Sonic Bloom, and a perfect flagship record for Toronto’s reverb-revelling Optical Sounds label.
Catch the Hoa Hoa’s a 6:00 p.m. in-store at Sonic Boom on Friday, December 4, then later that night play a record-release show at the Silver Dollar with The Disraelis, Action Makes and Your 33 Black Angels. - Richard Trapunski
