The Acid Sisters play space-dazed desert rock squeezed from cactus needles and scorched canyon echo. Drenched in sweat from the brutal heat of Las Vegas, this Nevada-based group takes their existential dread seriously on Neon Graveyard. It’s their second full-length album, released on June 27th, containing many echoes of dark psych masters like The Black Angels and Velvet Underground.
The band is led by the husband-and-wife duo of Elayna (vocals) and Nick Thompson (guitar), who live in Los Angeles for work while the rest of the band resides in Vegas. Elayna recently told Las Vegas Weekly that coming home to Vegas inspired the group’s first LP in six years (since their self-titled debut in 2018).
“Everything I was writing, all my inspiration was the Nevada desert, Las Vegas, and this weird bubble we live in,” said Elayna. “This city is like no other. We live in the middle of a desert. There shouldn’t be life here. There’s still nuclear activity in the dirt. Yet, I love this place.”
In that sense, the sound of Neon Graveyard is the sound of Vegas and the desert surrounding it. Neon Graveyard was crafted in the desert’s shimmering heat and the Vegas Strip’s neon glow. It’s a hallucinogenic journey through the surreal and sublime landscapes the band is all too familiar with, where the ancient and the modern violently collide under an endless starry sky.
The Acid Sisters don’t reinvent the wheel on the album, but that doesn’t take away from the fresh urgency of tracks like “Enchanted Isolation.” The Black Angels have often been noted as a band rooted in psych nostalgia, and the same could be said of Acid Sisters. “Black Cherries” gives the familiar tone of spooky psych rock, while “Golden Axe” features a droning guitar riff and ominous, monotone vocals that many psych fans will recognize.
The title track is more inventive, featuring an impressive and trippy collage of noises behind Elayna’s self-assured vocals. “Bonestown” features Elayna singing of a town burning to the ground, and I had to wonder about this. Burning from what? Perhaps the wildfires spreading in the U.S. West? “Strawberry Jam” closes things out just as forebodingly as the record starts, leaving us little doubt that The Acid Sisters are a group practicing the dark arts.
Desert rock is a funny genre in that so many bands who claim to play it nowadays have little experience of actual desert living. The Acid Sisters are the real deal in this sense. Neon Graveyard is music influenced as much by desert landscapes as perhaps anything else. The album may not be Kyuss’s classic Welcome to Sky Valley, but it’s an excellent desert rock record nonetheless.
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