REST IN FLEAS

Like visions from a 3D comic book, color fantasies explode in vivid new sound-tones on Cloud Becomes Your Hand's Rest in Fleas. The band's second album for Northern Spy establishes the Brooklyn sextet as purveyors of googley-eyed psych-pop of the highest order, delivered in a kinetically singular dialect of the musical language of fun. Over eight tracks, Cloud Becomes Your Hand affirm their position in the secret lineage that links the pingings of the BBC Radiophonics Workshop to the happy goofing of Syd-era Pink Floyd (like if the busted gearwork at the end of Bike started its own band'), a line that connects the energy dome power of Devo to the collage-happy Frosted Ambassador wing of the Elephant 6 Recording Company. Feed your head, right' But while the collective destination might be the sweet innocence of marmalade skies, the Cloud irregulars are hardly musical naifs, executing dazzling conceptual and compositional turns that puts them just as much in the family of New York's uncompromising experimental music scene. Just at home at hanging out at Brooklyn avant-garde institutions like Roulette as on homemade stages in over-enthusiastic loft installations, Cloud Becomes Your Hand are ready to find the doorway to elsewhere in any environment. Rest in Fleas functions much the same, using sleight of hand and pure charm to lash open a portal to the giddy surreal by any means necessary, from learned technique to spontaneous creation. Along with fellow travelers on the kosmik-noisenik highway like aggro-eclectic Guerilla Toss and Horse Lords, Cloud Becomes Your Hand continue to fight the good fight by not fighting at all, just emitting only the most colorful of vibrations and letting the air and all available ears do the rest.