Ah, wonderful Wales. With Ireland you can put your house on it raining but the same could be said for Wales and weirdly wonderful psychedelic bands. Following along a path laid by Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci and Super Furry Animals, to name but two, are Cardiff based psych folk collective Soft Hearted Scientists.
Their psychedelic-tinged folk owes much the heady days of ’60s and ’70s too. The collective’s trippy warped out and downright weird sounds are dripping with genuinely appealing eccentricity and sugar sweet melodies, grounded, only just, by musings of everyday life. A madcap of delights that if comparisons were needed, one might arrive at something like the lyrical depth, wordplay and acerbic wit of Half Man Half Biscuit, meets the off-the-wall antics of Syd Barrett and seductive sounds of Donavan or The Byrds. All in all, it is wonderful, bizarre and seductive in equal measures. These are songs which will burrow into the inner reaches of your mind.
With three albums under their belts already, they are hardly newbies but as album number four, entitled False Lights, is on the horizon it is a timely introduction to their wonderful psych folk delights.