10 Trippy Albums You MUST Hear Before You Die
8. Screaming Trees - Clairvoyance (1986)
As a precursor to the later grunge sound, the Screaming Trees' neo-psychedelic, little known, lo-fi debut album is as much influenced by punk as it is by the psychedelic pop of the sixties. The opener “Orange Airplane” sets the ambience for the entire album, as a child is heard repeatedly shouting overtop raucous guitar, to a refrain of “Orange airplane/Take me to a new day”.
Guitarist and primary songwriter Gary Lee Conner’s vast knowledge of sixties psyche-pop and garage is clearly evident in the lysergic groove of songs like “Seeing and Believing,” and “The Turning”, which combine the right combination of melody and dissonance, to create a vivid, far out kind of listening experience.
“Strange Out Here” also makes for an interesting aural art piece, as singer Mark Lanegan, the notoriously aloof shaman of alt-rock, channels his inner Jim Morrison, using his deep, whiskey drenched voice to drift seamlessly from crooning, to reciting the eerie spoken word lines, “In this city built on broken glass/And the carcasses of a million dead sheep/Where the blood runs thick down third street”. It’s not hard to see why the band labelled themselves “the four weirdest guys in Ellensburg”.