Album Review: Prince Daddy & The Hyena – Cosmic Thrill Seekers

Trying to get a handle on Cosmic Thrill Seekers is like trying to nail blancmange to the ceiling. Just when you think you have the measure of it, it slithers away and leaves you no further forward and increasingly frustrated. It’s so gratuitously eclectic that it seems to change shape before your very ears. One minute it’s lo-fi noodling, the next it’s full-on, brutal powerpop. And then sparklingly twee. Even within songs, there is a kind of wilful perversity in the stuttering musicality, measure changes, stereo tricks and bizarre chord progressions. But once you turn off your normal music appreciation filter and just let the tunes get inside, it all inexplicably makes some kind of sense.

It also makes sense that an album with songs titled C’mon & Smoke Me Up and Klonopin is going to have a drug theme woven through it. And sure enough, the album is described as: “a wild ride exploring the fall-out after an acid trip, manic self-destruction, bottoming-out and recovering, and then slipping again – it is a candid, acute documentation of frontperson Kory Gregory‘s cyclical mental health states told through three acts and 14 songs/chapters.” I’ll take their word for that, and the concept album approach does resonate with some of the more Queen-like moments of joyous pomposity. But for the continuity provided Gregory‘s vocal, this could be some kind of deliberately off-kilter compilation album.

For all its oddness, there is a cohesion that you only get after several listens. There are also moments of such sublime and aching beauty that you have to wonder if they have been dropped into the piece simply to make all the other wacky stuff all the more bewildering and disconcerting. After several listens, I’m still not getting the linear/narrative structure so I can only recommend this album on how it actually sounds. And I do recommend it, even if it sounds like a stoned Weezer throwing all their outtakes into a blender. I don’t think you would be any less or more confused if you listened to it on shuffle. All in all, what a strange trip this is. But a trip worth making, nonetheless.

Cosmic Thrill Seekers is available for streaming and as a name your price download here and you can also purchase Cosmic Thrill Seekers on black and coloured double vinyl variants via Big Scary Monsters Records here