Ganglians

Sacramento, California’s Ganglians fused gangs with aliens to forge their moniker much in the same way that they braid psychedelic surf music with lo-fi indie rock to conceive something that sounds born in the wake of John Dwyer’s utopia (the San Francisco Mission District art-rock scene). The quartet’s eponymous 2009 EP opens with “Hair,” a soaring and melodic college-radio mini-opus fueled by driving rhythms, heavily reverberated wave-riding guitar leads, and contagiously catchy singing. Slivers of punk-rock abandon come crashing down like overhead waves on “Rats Man,” a dirty but danceable nouveau surf-punk creation that sounds like the entire song was filtered through a walkie-talkie and recorded on recycled analog tape reels found while Dumpster-diving. While “Radically Inept Candy Girl” initially sounds like nothing more than four-track tomfoolery with a child’s toy keyboard, the novelty unravels to reveal a song on par with anything off Beck’s 1994 album One Foot In the Grave. Equally the strongest and weirdest track, “Snake Eyes” could be a futuristic field recording where Alan Lomax’s great, great grandson captured the folk songs of intergalactic surfers.