Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
In a moment of time when human activity has seemingly stuttered, and been the cause of other species disappearing off the face off the planet in numbers that seem unimaginable, perhaps it is time that we admit that the way we have accepted political dogma and its paymasters has had devesting results on the planet, and on the way, we interact with it.
The great reset maybe too grand a deal to cope with, it is after all loaded with an innuendo that will cause inflammatory feeling, instead we need to acknowledge that humanity needs to calm down, that the constant exploitation of our souls in the return for monetary security is causing us to diverge from what is our home, our neighbours, our very essence.
Whilst in no way should we advocate the ethos of a lost weekend as solving the initial problems of a species, we should investigate fully the beauty of a Stoned Weekend, the pathways and byways that led us a place in the clearing where we can sit back, drink in the surrounding aural pleasure, and forget for a while that the outside pressures are there because we have made them significant, that we have allowed the politicians of priority our lives, and that of a world consumed with being consumed.
Across tracks such as Missed Our Chance, Linda’s Tripp, Blue Water, Wyld Child, and the bookends of Stoned Weekend/Still Stoned, Drug Couple’s Miles and Becca Robinson, a pair from Brooklyn who fantastically built a studio out in the Vermont countryside, offer a dream, it might not be the one you envisage, it possibly wasn’t the one you were expecting, but in what can only be described as intriguing quicksilver caught in the beauty of its liquid state, Stoned Weekend is a fierce sentiment of illusion, the Americana that many who were raised on the words of Kerouac, of the images supplied by a poetic/artistic belief that ran through the heart of counter culture, for Stoned Weekend is the album of a time we should have had, one that would have seen so much of the deceit thrust upon us in the return for materialism, banished, forgotten, never mentioned again.
A terrific introduction to the mind and musical ability of Miles and Becca Robinson, the rat race left far behind, and one in which to reflect upon across an entire week as the blur of existence, the chase for the material passes us by.
Drug Couple release Stoned Weekend on the 18th of February via PaperCup Music.
Ian D. Hall