Out-there Unknown Mortal Orchestra mesh myth, legend and psychedelia
Unknown Mortal Orchestra are feeling the strain of life on the road, developing a hazy sound and a loose grip on reality, writes Gwilym Mumford
has witnessed many psychedelic revivalists, but while acts such as Tame Impala and Temples replicate sounds from the past, Unknown Mortal Orchestra exist on their own wavelength.
There are obvious nods to Pink Floyd and Captain Beefheart, but they're offset by chunky hip hop beats and weird, perambulating melodies relayed through singer Ruban Nielson's soulful falsetto and smothered in reverb. The result is alien but strangely comforting, like a weird, untitled mixtape you found in a second-hand car and became besotted with.
Fittingly, the back story for this New Zealand band is far from straightforward. After the acrimonious break-up of exuberant Auckland noise-rockers The Mint Chicks, in which he performed with his brother Kody, Nielson felt burnt out. He was living with his wife and two young children in Portland, Oregon, where they stayed for a time in a yurt.
In 2010, he anonymously uploaded a home-recorded track called to Bandcamp under the name Unknown Mortal Orchestra. A self-titled album followed, then the formation of a band with Portland natives Jake Portrait on bass and drummer Riley Geare.
They are in the middle of a lengthy tour - dropping into Hong Kong on January 21 - that has seen their precise psych-pop stretch into something looser and more hypnotic. There's a change in Nielson, too: wide-eyed and softly spoken in conversation, he develops a swagger when performing, careering wildly around the stage with his guitar.
"The person I am onstage is the person I'm being when I make my wife laugh in the kitchen, when I'm at my most comfortable. When you're onstage it seems so simple," he says.
Yet Nielson is mindful of the potential for what he calls "soul sickness", the stew of loneliness, alienation and "spiritual, mental and physical exhaustion" that comes with extensive touring. It's a point underlined by the band's first tour in 2011, an 18-month odyssey when the band's motto was "say yes to everything", and during which they lost two drummers to exhaustion.