Growing up between California and Argentina, Lucas Fitzsimons found life’s answers in garage-rock and its baroque mid-60s cousins. With guitarist/organist Ryan Foster and a band name taken from Allen Ginsberg’s promise-destroying nemesis in his poem Howl, Fitzsimons’ Molochs were born.
The Anglophile lingo (‘He’s such a dear boy’), opiated nursery drawl and woozy organ of Charlie’s Lips is deep in homage to Barrett’s Floyd, just as the Hammond in You Never Learn is to Al Kooper on ’65 Dylan duty. More interesting is the tendency to trancey, transformative repetition on the likes of the autobiographical, sick-bed sweaty Little Stars. ‘Pastiche innocence’ sounds like a contradiction, but Fitzsimons’s boyishly yearning voice links him to his ancestors more truly even than the urban twang and slow sting of guitars on the best track here, New York, with its 20th-century wonder at the city’s electricity and cold.
