Across their eighteen track collection A Pocketful of Phables, San Francisco veterans The Society of Rockets push their melodic indie-pop into its most psychedelic territory yet, moving through power pop, psych-folk, chamber-pop colour and eccentric British-inspired songwriting with the confidence of a band that knows exactly how far a good melody can stretch before it snaps.
Lead single ‘She Lives in a Museum’ is an immediate highlight, bursting forward on a windmill-guitar hook, restless piano and call-and-response harmonies. The song’s central character of a nostalgic, Norma Desmond-like figure retreating from the world around her gives the track a theatrical quality, while the arrangement keeps things bright, sharp and propulsive.
But the wider album is even more adventurous. Joshua Babcock frames A Pocketful of Phables as a kind of psychedelic journey, beginning in orbit around the moon before descending through woods, haunted houses, halls of mirrors and eventually to the bottom of the sea. The concept gives the record a wonderfully unmoored quality, with songs seeming to open into new environments before we have fully settled into the last one.
Musically, the lineage is obvious but richly handled. The Beatles, Syd Barrett, The Kinks, Guided by Voices and the Elephant 6 world all hover somewhere in the background, but the band do more than simply reproduce vintage psych-pop mannerisms. Buzzing melodies, chiming guitars, analogue keyboards, strings, horns and sudden rhythmic shifts give the record an almost storybook unpredictability.
Recorded and mixed at Hyde Street Studios with longtime producer Chris Cline, the album also benefits from a sense of physicality beneath all the whimsy. The arrangements may be elaborate, but there’s still a band playing underneath them. It’s a general tone and direction that keeps A Pocketful of Phables from becoming merely decorative.
For a ninth album, it feels remarkably curious. The Society of Rockets are still chasing strange sounds, crooked melodies and impossible little worlds. But this time, they’ve built an entire universe out of them.