Not every reverie is a happy one. A title like "She Takes Me There" suggests the floating bliss of a new love, but in this new taste of what the rising Nashville band Promised Land Sound is up to on its second album, the dream is a haunting.
"Well I wonder where she lays tonight," sighs Peter Stringer-Hye, his tenor breathing up and down the scale as guitarist Sean Thompson builds lines that circle back on themselves like a gentle obsession. He pictures her with another and wonders if she's laughing or crying. Evan Scala's stalwart drumming keeps the mood together, but there's just a hint that things are really falling apart. "Where could she be?" Stringer-Hye cries; "She's over me," background voices answer, desolate.
The loveliness and vitality of "She Takes Me There" reflects all of For Use And Delight. With a sound that's at once more focused and wider-ranging than on its first album, the group shows why psychedelia is always a great aesthetic to revive: It provides plenty of historical touchstones, from The Byrds to the Rain Parade to Promised Land Sound collaborator Steve Gunn; but because the psychedelic experience is about mind expansion, it always goes somewhere new. Sad or happy, calm like this track or ripping up the studio, this band is on a path that's deeply pleasurable.
For Use And Delight comes out Oct. 2 on Paradise of Bachelors.
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