“Faxing the Vatican” is the latest release by Acid Smoothie, a music outlet of Paul Dunne, an American multi-instrumentalist based in Laguna Beach, California. Heavily promoted by “Dice Guy,” a perfect introductory piece that vividly showcases what you might expect from the remainder of the album, this release serves as an appropriate continuation of “Spool Transport” Acid Smoothie’s critically acclaimed debut full-length, released earlier this year. Still, “Faxing the Vatican” arrives with many innovations in songwriting, composing, arranging, and producing, demonstrating a natural progression of the artist. Lyrically, this album delves deeply into existentialism and introspection in the technological world. Paul Dunne shares his thoughts and sentiments about it while exploring various themes, moods, situations, and circumstances. Therefore, it’s a highly relatable material that will immediately resonate with the broader audience. Sonically, Acid Smoothie explores various approaches and several complementary music genres to illustrate such luxuriant sonic imagery. Perhaps garage rock comes to mind first, but you’ll unquestionably notice how some of the finest properties borrowed from psych-rock, post-punk, and punk rock found their way into this sonic equation. Paul Dunne uses all these additional sonic ingredients as more than necessary enhancements, accentuations, decorations, and other details to uplift his music to an entirely new level while simultaneously remaining loyal to the primary sonic direction. His music arrives with qualities that meet contemporary psych rock music production yet there’s a subtle touch of nostalgia lurking around. Therefore, these experimentations with various approaches, techniques, and complementary music genres resulted in a comprehensive collection of catchy, memorable, engaging, hypnotic songs that will not only appeal to garage and psych rock fans but also to anyone who appreciates high-quality music.
As soon as you press play, you’ll notice how much heart and soul Paul Dunne invested into this fine piece of sonic artistry. Each composition arrives with a perfect structure, adorned with many profoundly detailed segments, brilliant ideas, and marvelous orchestrations. Every vocal, sonic, and rhythmic maneuver has its place and purpose in this sonic equation, making “Faxing The Vatican” such a pleasant listening experience worth repeating over and over again. From the onset, it becomes apparent that impressive guitar works play a significant role in shaping a lush backdrop for all the vocals to shine upon. The interplay between various layers makes this material so rich and luxuriant that you’ll need several listening sessions to grasp everything Paul Dunne incorporated into it. The entire amalgam of excellent riffs, catchy chord progressions, harmonies, melodies, and themes interplay harmoniously from scratch to finish, immensely supporting Duane’s excellent vocal performance. The generous servings of fuzz distortion make these guitar maneuvers so raw, abrasive, and gritty, yet you’ll hear everything Duane intended to achieve with these instrumentations. Of course, there are the additional guitar effects such as echo, reverb, and delay involved, elevating particular segments of entire compositions to another level. The artist also included keys and synths on almost every track, making “Faxing the Vatican” even more appealing to the ears. You’ll notice how all those leads, themes, melodies, experimentations, and other sonic maneuvers perfectly pair with guitar works.
Still, Paul Duane’s soulful, passionate, sincere, confident, emotional, and powerful vocal performance serves as a centerpiece here, elevating everything to new heights, commanding attention, and guiding the listening apparatus from scratch to finish. His voice seamlessly balances low, mid, and high notes, emphasizing everything he intended to achieve with this material with such precision and finesse. Besides decorating all those segments and instrumentations, his vocal performance also contributes more than necessary emotional depth and complexity to the complex song structures. It’s nearly mindblowing how all these instrumentations pair his vocal performance harmoniously, making it worth spinning over and over again. Beneath all those lush synth and guitar works lies an equally important low-end support. You’ll notice how all those vividly hearable, intricate, warm-sounding basslines rumble beneath those instrumentations, contributing heaviness, clarity, and depth while serving as a binding element between the mentioned synth, guitars, and rhythmic patterns. These low ends are rich, deep, dense, and heavy, providing more power, groove, and detail to these songs. In the meantime, the exceptional drumming performance keeps everything in line while dictating groove and tempo with many cleverly arranged, flawlessly performed, well-accentuated beats, breaks, fills, and other percussive acrobatics. You’ll hear how every hit of the snare, kick of the bass drum, accentuation over hi-hat, and splash over the cymbals cuts the ambiance, offering even more complexity to these tracks. Acid Smoothie thought about everything while writing, composing, arranging, and producing these compositions, making “Faxing the Vatican” such a fresh, unique, entertaining, one-of-a-kind voyage through the expansive garage rock universe. His experience, knowledge, creativity, talent, and skills have been distilled into brilliant ideas and superb musicianship that define every song included on this epic sonic journey. “Faxing the Vatican” is an album that will immediately become one of your favorite records of 2025, thanks to Acid Smoothie’s ability to break rules and shapeshift boundaries of so many genres while still remaining loyal to the garage rock sound. Therefore, you should immediately place this masterpiece on your music radar. “Faxing the Vatican” is available on all streaming platforms. Don’t miss it!
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