The Ketamines

Ketamines follow up on their solid album from 2012, and a rather fun and buoyant single from earlier in the year, with a proper full length, again for Southpaw, dubbed You Can't Serve Two Masters. The album plays up melody more than Lawton and co have in the past, shining the diamond of their past tracks into a gloss coated odyssey that's both crisp and inventive. That gloss doesn’t mean they’re playing it safe here though, with songs plowing into more psychedelic touches than ever before, but always with hooks lodged deftly into their cores. It seems that finding that balance between genre experimentation and solid garage pop is a theme at Southpaw this year, with both Ketamines and labelmates The Hussy exploding the core of John Dwyers' Oh Sees palette wide open and building mountains from the wreckage. Ketamines have found the delight in the details here, adding to their pop-tarted tracks with fuzzed out blasts, cartoon-indebted backing tracks, moody guitar washes and synth stabs that all seem pulled from their personal obsessions then melted, sewn and stapled together into an album that feels as personally seamless as it is aesthetically schizophrenic. In that way it’s perfectly suited to all us imperfect humans who can't stay on any direct track and can't resist a chewy pop center for the life of us.

Listen:


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