Artist:     Luke Haines & Peter Buck

Album:     Beat Poetry for Survivalists

Label:     Omnivore Recordings

Release Date:     3.6.20

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The door to a sprawling and often dark psychedelic-pop playground opens after kindred oddball spirits Luke Haines & Peter Buck ask, “Is anybody there?” Eccentric geniuses such as The Ramones, The Beach Boys and Andy Warhol, as well as Captain Beefheart’s delightfully insane Trout Mask Replica, eventually emerge from some parallel universe, namechecked by the visionary leader of Brit-pop insurgents The Auteurs and the former R.E.M. guitarist on this, their first collaborative adventure.

Down the rabbit hole of the subversive Beat Poetry for Survivalists they go, with Haines and Buck crash landing on the surreal wasteland of a burned-out, lazy “Apocalypse Beach,” where Donovan soundtracks the Armageddon via radio airwaves in an insidious earworm. Along the way, they run wild with the infamous occultist and rocket scientist “Jack Parsons” in the colorfully mellow song of the same name, tuning into the absurdist wanderings of Robyn Hitchcock and eventually floating in a cosmic sea of soft wah-wah effects and weird sonic debris. Ghostly tribal rhythms and an ozone layer of unnerving noise greet explorers in a hypnotic “Last of the Bigfoot Hunters,” before the sneering and seductive “Ugly Dude Blues” and “Andy Warhol Was Not Kind” swim in menacing undercurrents and glam-rock danger with David Bowie and T. Rex and the similarly cast “Witch Tariff” becomes a whispering, mysterious totem of fearful noir declaring, “All the black cats know where it’s at.”

Hitchcock is certainly one of them, as his folky whimsy and the neo-psychedelia of his old band, The Soft Boys, must have sparked the imaginative Beat Poetry for Survivalists, where the closer “Rock ‘N’ Roll Ambulance” drifts into a dreamy afterlife. Buck’s electric and acoustic guitar work are reluctant to step out of line anywhere on the record, as he chooses instead to let it color and shape every scene from behind the curtains. Haines’ vocals are wintery, and he acts as puppeteer with his guitar and synth machinations, while Scott McCaughey adds bass guitar and keyboard murmurings and drummer Linda Pitmon frames it all with a disarming ease. Playing on and on in an underground bunker, Beat Poetry for Survivalists would make for interesting listening at the end of days.

—Peter Lindblad