desmadrados soldados de ventura: the grand celestial purge

The eighth Desmadrados Soldados De Ventura album, The Grand Celestial Purge, is a three-hour, four LP box set of psychedelic musings on the departed musicians of 2016. Produced by Richard Formby and recorded at a converted church in Leeds, this is DSDV's most melodious and spacious album to date. You can hear clear nods to The Grateful Dead throughout as well as fragments of Can, Carlos Santana and John McLaughlin's Love Devotion Surrender (1973) and even Tim Buckley's Blue Afternoon (1969) band. Drowned in tape echo and with a Wally Heider-style snap to the drum sound, the recording has all the traits of a classic Formby production. Gone is much of the blur of guitars that shrouded the band's previous albums in cacophony; Whilst still present here and there, it's been replaced with a somewhat virtuoso level of interplay that smacks of a bygone, pre-ironic era in rock music where sincerity, dedication to the craft of improvisation, and the desire to transcend the mundane via heightened, sustained hive-mind mentality was all that mattered. Personnel: David Birchall - guitar; Andrew Cheetham - drums; Richard Formby - synths; Dylan Hughes - guitar; Nick Mitchell - guitar, bass; Dom Tanner - guitar; Otto Willberg - bass.