Premiere: Psychic Lines wrestles with a ‘Buzz’ in his head

Philip Jacob was erratic, his emotions boiling and sloshing inside of him. “It was a particularly exhausting day,” he remembers of the day which birthed a song called “Buzz,” premiering today on B-Sides & Badlands. Guitar chords fizz and pop along a throbbing thread line, and the pieces, often in staticky, sticky contrasts, grind together to mimic his own distorting mental images. Known onstage as Psychic Lines, the Brooklyn musician first struck upon the identifiable guitar riff, gurgling and rumbling from his fingertips, and on the recording, it’s a blissful and hypnotic sequence.

“And I wasn’t missing anything / I wasn’t losing out on a damn thing,” he exhales in sharp, well-sculpted lines. “Is there a small red pill that you could bring? / To calm my nerves, it’s just the thing I need.”

“Buzz,” off his forthcoming new album, Late Nite Psychic (pre-order here), out June 5, soothes and super-charges the bones. “And I’m always on the phone / When you are on the phone / And you’re always on the phone / So I am on the phone,” the decaying descent leaves a stench on the nostrils, flaring with piercing aches. Jacob’s voice is reliably languid, only tightening on the song’s thesis: “A buzz in my head, that’s all.”

The visual, directed by Wilkes Lem, cobbles seemingly unrelated imagery ⏤ from darkly-lit performance footage and somber sidewalk meandering to images from the cinema ⏤ into a jumbled mosaic. It serves to only underscore Jacob’s emotional and mental states, running against and with one another, and oozing into a startling portrait. “I wasn’t losing out on a goddamn thing / Everyone’s right here on this tiny screen,” he later surmises.

On the song, he explains over email: “I was in a strange mood, kind of beaten down but also kind of manic. I felt like making something. At the time I had been listening to a lot of The Fall and reading Steve Hanley’s memoir. I wanted to come up with a riff that had his kind of feel and work quickly like they did. I remember as soon as I got home and picked up the bass that line just fell out,” he says. “I recorded myself playing it over and over again and sort of went into a trance. That’s how the song began to take shape.”

He adds, “My initial goal on the train back home to Brooklyn earlier that evening was to write and record an entire album in one night, but I only started two songs before I passed out. I guess it’s good to aim high.”

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