Interview Toast of Perth: Psychedelic Porn Crumpets

“You get those old psych bands with these 40-minute solos and unless you’re completely off your tits then you’re just waiting for something to happen,” begins guitarist Luke Parish. “But psych music is the only genre that doesn’t hone in on one thing,” joins in co-axeman and vocalist Jack McEwan. “It’s so vast, and you can go from a Radiohead album to Mars Volta to Godspeed You! Black Emperor because it’s a free pass to do anything. It’s so progressive at the moment that people are trying to push the boundaries rather than join them.”

Hailing from the fertile musical hotbed of Perth (home to Tame Impala, Pond, Methyl Ethel and more), the two men, plus pals Danny Caddy (drums) and Luke Reynolds (bass) make up Psychedelic Porn Crumpets - the newest outfit aiming to follow their kinsmen into the technicolour hinterlands of music’s spectrum. But while the combination of a truly atrocious name plus a genre prone to noodling might suggest that the Crumpets are just another bunch of acid-soaked mind-benders, the quartet are actually coming from a slightly altered angle. Instead of elongated fret-wanking, the likes of recent singles ‘Cornflake’ and ‘Social Candy’ are proof that you can be brimming with ideas while still clocking in around the concise, four-minute mark. Luke has a theory. “Both [those songs] are quite compressed, because in the process you squeeze the orange. All the other stuff and the rind goes in the bin and you just get the orange juice at the end,” he begins. “But if you like oranges then you’ll probably still like the orange juice.” Well, indeed.