The High Dials
War of the Wakening Phantoms
Rainbow Quartz
4.5 stars

Listening to this album is kind of the way I guess being sucked through the world’s biggest bong and exhaled in one long stream of smoke would feel. A dizzying constellation of late 60s influences, masterfully distilled and reinvented by the Montreal four-piece, forms the dense latticework of War of the Wakening Phantoms, the High Dials’ third release.

There’s no real duff track on the record, so long as rampant psychedelia is your very groovy bag. Of course, you don’t need me to tell you that they are waving that freaky flag high, because you have several other psych-signifiers at your disposal. The record title, for starters. The Rainbow Quartz label is also a dead giveaway. Then there is the Celtic-cursive hand-lettering of the cover, jostling for space with illustrations of demons, dragons, Valkyries, and, um, UFOs, among other things. It’s like five Junior High loner art geeks collided in the hall and all the drawings on their math binders got jumbled together somehow, marvelously, on the same page.

The Dials put the ‘trip’ in ‘trippy’, but they do it so well that the album remains accessible to Hawkwind haters. The hook-heavy melodic rock of the opener (and one of the highlights), ‘The Holy Ground’, rockets War right into space, never again to touch the earth. ‘Our Time Is Coming Soon’ is increasingly frenetic, culminating with a balls-out drum avalanche. Mid-album, ‘The Lost Explorer’ strangely evokes “Major Tom’, while the Donovan-esque ‘The Drum’ is sweetly sorrowful, and the Byrds-y ‘A River Haunting’ is gloriously beautiful pop.

I can’t imagine another band, in 2005, getting away with an eight-minute proggy romp with a chorus consisting of a bunch of star names chanted over a couple druggy guitar lines (‘Your Eyes Are A Door’), but the High Dials bring guts and gusto to the genre, so you can’t help but fall for their quirks.