It has been only a few months since I found about the release of the British occult psychedelic rockers UNCLE ACID & THE DEADBEATS album "Blood Lust" (and my enthusiastic review of it) and here they are again with their third release "Mind Control". Expanding and extending their own approach on the 70s psychedelic/horror music idiom which is rooted on the axioms of BLACK SABBATH and the likes of the prime Doom / Stoner sound "Mind Control" concentrates all the elements of that sound.

The album features nine songs for a duration of fifty minutes. The cover is an image of valley in the mountains in a colored frame. The band could use something better and more retro and psychedelic than this given the options one could have with a title like "Mind Control". The album has a stoner vibe that is coming into attention from the first song "Mt. Abraxas" a seven minute long composition. In the same style comes almost the half of the songs as "Desert Ceremony", "Valley Of The Dolls" and "Devil's Work" with heavy riffs and doses of psychedelia. There are more groovy/heavy songs like "Mind Crawler", "Poison Apple" or "Evil Love" which are short in duration but addictive as hell.

In "Mind Control" I think that the band lost a lot of their magic that was existing in "Blood Lust". The songs with long duration most of the times seemed pointless to me. While the musical and lyrical forms could be fitting in them there was the feeling that essence was the thing that was most absent. There were pointless parts that could be absent and the record could be a forty minute one bearing a classic vintage play time but mostly having just the necessary parts. On the other hand the short / groovy songs were a pleasure to listen to and in my opinion are the highlights of the record. To be more precise the record is unbalanced as the first part has some really cool and strong songs while the rest are mediocre. The production while still keeping a vintage semi distorted sound is more polished than the previous one. The lineup of the band has changed and the ladies are gone (or at least they were supposed to be in the previous record) and only the UNCLE ACID moniker is present in the cover. I could estimate, but there are no certain facts to properly justify my opinion, that the band capitalized on their success and tried to create the successor of "Blood Lust" but be it pressure from the record label or just quick work couldn't manage to the really high standards of the previous record.

Contrary to my really high expectations I found "Mind Control" not the kind of the record that I would expect from UNCLE ACID & THE DEADBEATS. It is to their advantage that they did not release a copy of the previous record but broadened their horizons and evolved their style but in any case I couldn't fill myself fit into this one. However it is a band that is definitely worth checking out whether being "Mind Control" or their previous works.