Review Summary: Another one?
As one of Sensory Deprivation’s many shorter endeavors, it’d be fair to assume that Deprived Senses provides a pretty enjoyable some-noise rock / some-enjoyable nonsensical psychedelic and ambient jam that lasts under twenty minutes. And that’d be a very fair assumption to make, especially when it comes to the act’s third EP. The record is wonderfully accessible, and takes absolutely no effort and very little time to sit down for an hour and listen three or four times, have a good time, and never come back. SD’s guitar playing has always been fairly unoriginal but easily grooved to, the drumming has always been competent, and there’s never really been a strong bass or vocal presence. To be frank, this EP is basically representative of SD’s overall style and its ensuing tendencies.
The record’s opener, Inhypobolyptic, is a chaotic swirling mass of sharp guitar lines and lost vocal lines taken right from the peak of psychedelia. The song works wonders in building tension; in Oceanic style guitars race around each other, racing to an eventual top of a climactic mountain. The opener does a decent enough job in teasing the heartrate, but unfortunately overstays its welcome by nearly 2 minutes of its 4:30 runtime. The record’s second song, Saturated, does very little to stray from the style of the first track. Instead the only sort of noticeable difference is that Saturated manages to put into gear a very natural-feeling groove.
It’s actually really funny that it turned out this way because it seems SD mastermind Brendan Nixon wrote one song, duplicated it, and gave one copy a post-metal structure and gave the other a funk structure. Nonetheless, the noise rock and psychedelic vibes remain incredibly prominent in these two first tracks. The record’s closer, Britt, breaks away from that overall sound and branches into a much more speedy and cool territory. Rhythmic riffs that remind all too much of GY!BE kick the song off, pushing it quickly and almost forcefully into a fearful and panicked state. Unfortunately the vocals in Britt become a nuisance, destroying an otherwise very solid track.
SD’s third EP is about as simple as this writing makes it seem. In some spots the music works really well, albeit unoriginal, and in other spots it may seem tremendously amateur. But Brendan Nixon manages to find a great niche in his cool combination of noise rock, 60’s LSD-laden swirliness, and his very own brand of atmospheric surroundings. These three tracks are great for an occasional jam but fail to demand any sort of revisiting; instead this EP is just an important steppingstone for the seemingly endless stream of Sensory Deprivation records.
