So many bands amble along the dusty path of Sabbath-inspired psychedelic metal that it’s often hard to distinguish worthy wheat from generic chaff, but General have nimbly leapt over the usual generic trap doors.
Although there’s an undeniable debt owed to Monster Magnet, this Coventry crew have injected plenty of their own sonic drug cocktail into the lumbering riffs, nerve gas solos and bleakly soulful proclamations that coalesce around a core of flagrant groove worship, resulting in a satisfyingly fresh and refined strain of trippy bombast.
Whether you’ve baked your brain with high-grade weed or not, this is a consistently absorbing saunter through the dark side of hippiedom that reaches a thrilling peak of woozy lethargy on sprawling finale Hydrogen, a song so gloriously primitive and steeped in blues juice that it threatens to rip a hole in the space-time continuum and hurl us all screaming back to a Hawkwind gig in some godforsaken council estate squat in 1971. A powerful reminder of what it really means to get psyched.
