As noted on Volume 144 of the WOTT Music podcast, the latest release from Wax Mistress is the follow-up from February 2018’s excellent A Ghost in the Garden LP. While early 2018 may seem like forever ago in Internet time, it’s a particularly short time for a band to be able to write, record and release a batch of songs, especially when they’re as intricately layered as the contents of Hello Beautiful.
Within the span of four songs the band wastes no time showing off their ability to hop between the dreamy and the outright bursting. Quite intentionally, the album pays homage to a variety of different psychedelic styles. Here’s the album’s writeup, direct from the band:
A brief exploration of modern psychedelia. Verbed out soundscapes to garage driven energy. Contemplating the genre’s several emerging styles as well as paying homage to its past, and attempting to fuse them into one cohesive EP, Hello Beautiful is a love letter to psychedelia in all its different forms.
Paying homage can be a difficult task as you run the risk of feeling inauthentic or, even worse, entirely derivative. Fortunately, Wax Mistress clearly knows the subtleties of the genre as a whole and is able to transform those tenants into a collection that is immediately familiar yet still entirely their own.