Moundabout’s music feels more like it’s been summoned from the depths of the Earth than composed in any traditional fashion. Esker Hippy Bastard Blues is Paddy Shine and Phil Langero’s second album of 2025. Initially it seems warmer and more approachable than the eldritch Goat Skull Table (which opened, let’s not forget, with an atonal incantation lasting for ten terrifying minutes), but it soon reveals its own strange nooks and crannies.
First track ‘Changeling’ is the closest thing to a traditional song here, all loosely-strummed guitar and Langero alternately “searching all night” and “running wild” to hide from, or perhaps win back, an obsessive lover. Despite their conceptual focus, Moundabout are, at their core, a psychedelic jam band and that same loose spirit extends to the lyrics, which may mean something personal, but also could very well have been written on the fly.
‘Glassfinger’ switches things up, bringing in the album’s defining sound: dissonant electric guitar swamped in distortion and feedback. There’s a looping, lulling repetition here, reminiscent of Tuluum Shimmering’s sprawling and hypnotic compositions. The same can be said of the cinematic ‘Dust’, which marries a simple repeating guitar figure with stronger melodies and an ocean of reverb, conjuring images of a desolate landscape. The duo has previously spoken of the importance of the natural world to their work, something that shone through on their debut Flowers Rot, Bring Me Stones, a record that was thematically located inside an ancient burial mound. For this LP, the band recorded on the Esker Riada, a series of long ridges of sand and gravel that cut across the middle of Ireland, and it’s quite remarkable how well this music captures that lonely atmosphere.
‘Mumuration’, sandwiched between ‘Glassfinger’ and ‘Dust’. offers an oasis in this green desert. Its simple echoed melody is strikingly beautiful and calm. The same can’t be said of ‘Dream Circle’, a delirious bad trip ritual narrative that finds the narrator witnessing an infinity of circles (bringing to mind the unicursal mazes that have adorned various Moundabout covers) behind the skin of reality, conjured by some hippy shaman. Although musically pretty dissimilar, it joins the dots between Shine and Langero and other visionary occult outsiders like Coil or Nurse With Wound, the artist that sparked their collaboration in the first place.
After that, the straightforwardly-named ‘Flange’ feels comparatively grounded. There’s no decoding needed here: it’s a strummed instrumental that has indeed been flanged to within an inch of its life. It’s head-noddingly groovy, though, and like ‘Murmuration’, a reminder that this band doesn’t solely trade in unease.
Finally, ‘Esker Blues’ closes the record with a guitar loop, processed beyond all recognition until it becomes a mechanical, percussive backdrop for wild psych rock curlicues. As with the rest of this simultaneously cosmic and grounded album there’s an elemental minimalism at work. “How easily we forget that we are descending from minerals,” Langero intones at one point on ‘Dream Circle’ – it always comes back to stone, with these guys. Esker Hippy Bastard Blues is rooted in the dust and grit of the place it was recorded, but Moundabout dream of the stars and of things lost to the unknowable depths of time.
