Death By Chocolate
"My friend Jack eats sugar lumps... Sugar man hasn't got a care." It's understandable if these lyrics--sung by a vocalist who sounds like a mischievous 14-year-old British girl over a perky bump-bump-bump-ba-dump-pa guitar riff--make you think that the current psychedelic-pop revival has gone a bit too far. But Death by Chocolate, who top their polite lounge-exotica tunes with a thick frosting of hallucinogenic sound effects, are weird and charming enough for you to forgive their derivativeness. Compared with their American counterparts in the retro-psych Elephant 6 scene, Death by Chocolate are less concerned with writing perfect pop songs than with simply creating groovy mood pieces; many of the tracks here are built around hypnotic riffs or spoken words. "A, B & C" merges a Doors-like keyboard roll with a sweetly odd recitation of the alphabet ("G is for Gregorian, the ritual music named after Pope Gregory I"). If you ever thought Alice needed a better soundtrack for skipping around Wonderland's Technicolor garden, this is it.--Lisa Gidley