The latest offering from San Francisco-based Primordial Undermind follows up their previous Camera Obscura release "You and Me and the Continuum" with an album of dense, sprawling and architecturally-complex psychedelic rock, with few parallels in recent memory, save perhaps the work of Bardo Pond, Major Stars, and some of the key emissaries out of the Tokyo neo-psychedelic underground. The addition of Doug Pearson (violin and analog electronics) to the twin guitars of Eric Arn and Brian Craft has no doubt contributed to the conflagration going on here. Because "Universe I've Got" fires giant plasma bolts of driven, wickedly-distorted space rock into your brain with the force of an angry god hurling a burning asteroid into a boiling ocean. Draw a line from Hawkwind through F/i and Vocokesh to Mainliner, and you will be getting close to the feel of tracks like "The Gospel According to Bandhu", "Manta" and "Weightless Nemesis". But the extraordinary achievement of this record is to bring so much wattage to bear while retaining accessibility and an unimpeachable melodic sensibility. And watch out for a magnificently stoned-sounding version of the Blue Oyster Cult classic, "Flaming Telepaths".

The Undermind are renown for putting on an explosively psychotropic live show, mining the range of their material from shorter power-psych rifferama to extended modal freakouts. They have played out most notably at several of Boston's Deep Heaven festivals as well as the infamous Terrastock festivals in Providence and San Francisco.