Platoon

Few outfits have mastered the art of creating endlessly digressive, acid-damaged psychedelia as completely as San Francisco’s Magic Lantern. Their first two full-lengths slowed the primitive assault of Blue Cheer to a druggy crawl, giving listeners ample time to bask in the radiance of layer upon layer of bristling feedback. Magic Lantern’s third full-length, Platoon, finds the band slightly picking up the tempo and immersing itself in the more aggressive, rhythmically demanding sounds of late-‘60s and early-‘70s funk. If efforts like High Beam looked to Sabbath and Earth for inspiration, Platoon takes early Funkadelic as its primary touchstone, meaning that the drums hit harder and the tempos move at a faster clip than on earlier Magic Lantern releases. The only real misstep here is the group’s cover of Iron Knowledge’s incendiary early-‘70s funk-rock obscurity “Showstopper,” which, though serviceable, doesn’t capture the original recording’s wild-eyed conviction.