VA - Mindexpanders Volume 1-3 (2009-2010)

From dustedreviews.com: “Maybe teen angst used to mean
something, back when there was a war on, man. Maybe fuzzy,
distorted guitars sound more “raw” and “authentic” than any
of the slop polluting post-millennial “modern rock” radio.
Maybe the rise of psychedelic “consciousness” was an occasion
for unbound courage and optimism. Maybe the Baby Boomers used
up all the good times. Regardless, pop music was always a
shameless racket. As soon as there was an identifiable
“movement,” there was always a cadre of gleefully cynical
tricksters there to mock and exploit it. And while the
paradoxically way-out and with-it thought-leaders of the
‘60s get revered into irrelevance, all the cruft and dried
bubblegum of that most overrated of decades seems to get
more and more alluring for our current epoch’s music-nerds.
Bashing the ‘60s was a ‘90s thing. But digging up its most
embarrassing moments survives as a rewarding pastime.

Mind Expanders isn’t the only collection of ‘60s artifacts
on the racks, obviously. Before the first Nuggets box, before
the neo-garage fad… yes, even before Sweetwater, this era has
been repackaged ruthlessly enough, and it will keep getting
drained until the well is emptied down to the last few Tommy
James outtakes. What makes this ‘un interesting is that, in
the manner of the like-minded archivists at Arf! Arf!, P&P
homes in on the most absurd, most ridiculous, most outwardly
exploitative relics. Perhaps any “zeitgeist” can be best
understood by the work of those who spend that time mocking
it, whether or not they knew what they were doing. In more
practical terms, this is a bonanza of wine-through-the-nose
oddities and potential samples.

Aside from the spoken intro to Los Diablos’s
Tijuana-Brass-in-space toe-tapper “21-7-69,” Mind Expanders
is all instrumental, and it’s got all the psychedelic elevator
music any healthy person could want. The most dated material?
Probably the preponderance of tracks that play their melodies
with clunky sitars, including two Stones covers, the fuzzgasm
“Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow?” and
the paranoid mini-symphony “We Love You.” Much of the balance
is surprisingly self-contained, particularly the blistering
snarl of Distillation’s “Blue Phantom” and the spastic
proto-punk of Sun Rock Rodeo Roundup’s “Afternoon Breakdown.””

"An mind expanding set of rare psychedelia from a series that gets better as it goes– Mind Expanders Volume 3 – rarities from the US and European scenes and featuring a slew of far reaching, tripped out instrumental psyche jams! Many of the tunes come out of the psychedelia exploitation racket, which gives it a bit of a seedier charm, but the sounds are indeed expansive – big percussion, crazy organ and keyboard grooving, vamping guitars and more from tunes that range from hazy psyche funk to bubblegum trash rock."