Inspired by the Beatles circa Revolver, Mike Donovan’s lo-fi marauders fuse their habitual folksy garage and fantastical psych into a wily sound fleshed out with Mellotron and tape echo.
Hyde Street Studios has been canceling out the din of its eponymous San Francisco block for six decades now. As Wally Heider Studios in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it freeze-framed the boundless spirit of the Bay Area—and the counterculture more broadly—in records by Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead. A half-century on, in a dank, unassuming space next door, Mike Donovan’s lo-fi marauders the Peacers help to carry the mantle for savvy psychedelia.
Recorded between 2017 and 2020 at Hyde Street, another space across the way, and in Hudson, New York, their third album, Blexxed Rec, mines scrappy pop majesty from a relatively modest setup. Reuniting Donovan with Bo Moore, Shayde Sartin, and Mike Shoun—returning from 2017’s Introducing the Crimsmen—joint action proves key here. Splitting songwriting duties so that each member reveals a hue of their full-spectrum sound, the band earns its loose supergroup stripes. In sound and synergy, the example of the Beatles circa Revolver looms large. It’s a big shadow to fill out, but they wear it well.
Like many of their peers, including Donovan’s previous outfit, Sic Alps, the Peacers have generally sat in the overlap of two compatible worlds: folksy garage and fantastical psych. Here these often thread as one. A shifting, glam-tinged gem, “Dickdog in Paris” is an exercise in changing gears. Flipping full-blown swagger to skeletal Mellotron and tape echo, it neatly captures the band’s wily curveballs. Elsewhere, the acoustic-driven “Stinson Teep” is a peak. “All the living, faceless actors/You can have your Grammy now,” Donovan drawls. It’s languid, kind of out of it—a dosed tale that equally conjures White Fence and G N’ R Lies, if the latter had a Drag City catalog number.
In a recent video, a masked-up Bo Moore and Mike Shoun gave a guided tour of their space on Hyde Street. They geek out over mics, snare drums, and other equipment. But it’s their trusty ¼" 8-track recorder, the Tascam 388, that commands the most reverence. The versatile, affordable machine has gained a cult-like following among artists in the Bay Area and beyond (John Dwyer’s Castle Face have regularly used it to capture shows in the garage and psych community). It isn’t the vintage desk next door, and it’s far from Studio Two at Abbey Road, but with it, the Peacers get dynamic range while retaining that all-important analog touch. This Goldilocks ideal has a point: The band are, in their own thrifty way, gearheads but not precious. Blexxed Rec captures that important distinction. Crowning it all is the way each instrument is fixed in space, neither lost nor squashed in the mix. Dozy to the point of almost veering off the road, the Syd Barrett-like slouch of “Irish Suit” exhausts the full range of their beloved recording console.
As Stephen Malkmus has in recent years, particularly on Sparkle Hard, the band honors past masters without skewing into pastiche. The most obvious hat tip to the Beatles, Moore’s “Colors for You” blends the warm, round tone of Paul McCartney’s Hofner bass with a backward-looped swirl of strings. Penned by Sartin, who stocked the rock shelves at San Francisco’s Amoeba store for a number of years, “Make It Right” plays like a long-lost relic from a Bay Area troubadour of yore. “You know I want to make it right,” Sartin vows over a brittle refrain. It’s the band’s most heartfelt moment this time around—not least because it sits alongside titles like “Dickdog in Paris” and “Ghost of a Motherfucker.”
In various formations, Donovan has long been an ace at wrangling puckish lyrics from the prosaic. Here, Sartin and Moore adopt the tried-and-tested approach as they outright refuse to signpost the times beyond getting by in a vague, Dadaist daze. “Irish Suit” concerns itself with “Catholic leisure” and pink guitars. On “Blackberry Est,” Donovan sings, “You cleared your debt and straightened your top.” A highlight, the lysergic pop of “Dandelion” finds Moore obliquely asking, “Who will tell her now?” Maybe it has something to do with its three-year gestation, but these songs don’t feel typical of the times. In fact, they sidestep worldly strife in ways we should probably be thankful for.
The current status of rock’n’roll—rendered by longtimers like Foo Fighters less an art form or a living culture than a contractual obligation—make the Peacers feel all the more invaluable. There’s no “Eleanor Rigby” or “Tomorrow Never Knows” here, but by absorbing and reimagining the spacious, surrealist lineage from which they have sprung, they offer an album that feels like it’s already stood the test of time.
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