The Butterscotch Cathedral - The Butterscotch Cathedral (2015)

Under the banner of the Resonars, Matt Rendon has been making top-notch powerful psych-pop for a long time. Anyone with even a tiny interest in that sound really needs to be up to date on all their releases. The Butterscotch Cathedral is a side trip Rendon embarked on with the help of two friends, Chris Ayers and Jim Waters. After Rendon came up with some basic chord structures and song ideas, Ayers wrote almost all the lyrics. After the songs were recorded, Waters added sound effects and helped piece the album together — not an easy task because it's a classic concept album where the first side of the LP is one long song made up of shorter songs all stitched together. The flip has one short tune and a 17-minute-long suite. With influences like the Hollies, the Beach Boys, and the Zombies to go along with Rendon's usual Who fixation, the album is loud, tripped-out, and incredibly melodic. There are short, catchy pop sounds, drifting soundscapes, folk-rock singalongs, and freakbeat freakouts in the mix, all driven by Rendon's fiery guitar mastery. He rips through the mix like a downed power line, sparking and slashing with abandon. The drumming is also powerful, his vocals are layered in stacks of harmonies, and the overall sound is crystal-clear on top with swirling pools of murky reverb and echo underneath. The snippets of songs flow together masterfully, taking the listener on short journeys of sound that never stray far from a very hooky chorus or a soaring bridge. Could the songs have been extracted from the suites, given titles, and been made to stand on their own? Definitely. If they had, then this would have been just another album of really, really good psych-pop. The way they did it makes it something special, a true concept album. It's a work of sonic trickery and production skill, something not every band with a fuzz box and Holy Grail could necessarily pull off. Rendon and his crew make it seem easy. Butterscotch Cathedral is super-trippy, super-hooky, and super-easy to love if you have any affinity at all for classic psych, vintage power pop, or the epic grandeur of '60s art pop.