Virginia Wing's Forward Constant Motion is an adventurous, mischievous, proper psych record

Having halved in membership since their initial activities as a four-piece, Alice Merida Richards and Sam Pillay now share control of Virginia Wing. In the development of Forward Constant Motion, the pair enlisted the help of Hookworms’ MB and Grimm Grimm’s Koichi Yamanoha, both esteemed figures in psychedelic/art rock scenes in their own right. The result is a restless patchwork of an album, whose reluctance to settle into an even, comfortable groove just might be its greatest strength.

Like many genre tags, the word “psychedelic” has been abused beyond all meaning in recent years, particularly in the wake of the flaccid wave of ‘60s/’70s garage-rock revivalists that clung (and in some cases still cling) to The Horrors’ modish coat-tails following the release of Primary Colours. Yet to apply the term to Forward Constant Motion feels appropriate: like most decent psychedelic music, this album sounds invigorated by its playful challenging of genre boundaries. It’s an adventurous, mischievous effort, whose polystylism is borne from a magpie-like borrowing of the shiniest bits of indie rock, electro-pop and ambient music rather than a po-faced crusade to open anyone’s mind.

If that sounds a tad condescending, I don’t mean it to – it’s just refreshing to hear a band manage to sound both genuinely unusual and excited by that. And for the most part, Virginia Wing’s idiosyncrasies produce wonderful results; much of the album is characterised by effortless, immediate melody, which entwines itself with effervescent percussion and tactile drapes of synths and samples to arresting effect. The album’s closer, “Future Body”, is a case in point. The track’s cyclical instrumentation forms an urgent bed for a Richards’ focussed, taut vocal, which erupts into the album’s biggest hook at exactly the right time.

Occasionally, the record does lose its way slightly. Torn between gleaming immediacy and dense, Aphex Twin-esque electronica, there are several points at which VM fail to quite manage to either lean in either pole or successfully combine the two. This accounts for the album’s midway lull, which though only slight is definitely noticeable. The record’s introductory cluster, from “Lily of Youth” to “Grapefruit” brims with vim and ambition, as does its closing leg, from “Local Loop” onwards. In fairness, there’s nothing offensive about the three intervening tracks – they just do not feel as fully-realised as the passages by which they are bookended.

In the nebulous field of psychedelia, there’s plentiful room for a band as immediate and audibly exhilarated as Virginia Wing. In many ways, Forward Constant Motion represents an engaging companion piece to the year’s other great British psych-pop album, Grumbling Fur’s Furfour. Like Daniel O’Sullivan and Alexander Tucker, Richards and Pillay are a duo who yield engagingly accessible, multi-faceted results through the equal distribution of creative control.