Started back in 2012, Black Thumb is the dark outsider pop solo project of San Francisco denizen composer and musician Colin Wilde (of Dusk, and Tenement, among others), who, after a long hiatus since his 2016 debut album, “It Is Well With My Soul”, is going to drop the sophomore 11-track LP “The Flying Propeller Group,” on April 28, 2023, via Oakland‘s DIY label Dandy Boy Records.
“The Flying Propeller Group” ‘explores new ground with forays into tape, echo, fuzz, and even more developed affection for ambience.’
Black Thumb‘s entrancing and cathartic sound drifts on the dizzy and oneiric edge of Psychedelia, Shoegaze, and Drone-laden Pop, pulled from Velvet Underground, My Bloody Valentine, Spacemen 3, and Jesus & Mary Chain suggestions, with minimal, sparse yet intricate layered arrangements, outlined by 60s vintage Vox guitar tremolo riffs, Farfisa organ chords and sound effects that wrap, merge and flow, amid hazy melodies and subtly scratching dissonances, in a hypnotic trance-inducing, drenched in obsessive rhythmic reiterations and lethargic progressions, at times sublimated by noisy tremors of feedback, as a drifting undercurrent into the murkiest recesses of the mind.
The daunting psychological “Walk On By” builds surreal melancholic Velvet Underground-tinged atmospherics with warped sad organ glowing swells laced with low humming frequencies, wistful guitar strums, and sluggish tambourine shakes, to encapsulate dual male/female feather-light vocal wisps in hopeless spirals of denial and shame, floating weightlessly into slowly emerging brighter orchestrations of increasingly intense, vibrating and twangy hues.
Mesmeric lysergic visuals bend the mind’s eye of imagination into a kaleidoscopic tapestry of catharsis and reflection. Psychedelic light show overlays and stoic shadowy performance shots merge with hypnotic flows of instrumentation, to manifest the purgatorial lyrical realm, where shapeshifting perceptions give rise to insight and hope.
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