Dios - "We Are Dios"

I’ve never heard anything like We Are Dios before.

Well, I have, but never tossed this way. This is a psychedelic salad with Townshend’s gourds, Zappa’s rutabagas, Lennon’s strawberries and vegetables from Brian Wilson’s vegetable garden marinated in reverb and harmony.

If you give Dios a chance, We Are Dios fully flowers as a psychedelic garage mashup that could’ve been produced by Girl Talk because almost every song seems spliced together from old sixties recordings. Except instead of rappers he’s invited The Beach Boys or Crosby, Stills and Nash to do the honors. Actually, the 60s vocalist I hear clearest on Dios tracks like ‘No Is Wrong’ is Ray Collins, The Mothers of Invention’s lead singer on recordings such as Freak Out! and Absolutely Free that reconfigured rock and roll. Frank Zappa might’ve been the first to poke fun at the hippies but it’s hard to imagine the music of the era without the input of his band.

We Are Dios sounds like the record Brian Wilson would’ve made if he had been as turned on by Frank Zappa’s Freak Out! as everyone else was turned on by his Pet Sounds.

For me We Are Dios takes off with the fourth track: F.Y.P.’s ‘Toss My Cookies’, a light hearted rearrangement that sounds like a cross between a Lumpy Gravy outtake and Pink Floyd’s ‘Bike’. This playfulness suits Dios well, as does ‘Stare At Wheel’ with its fully American psychedelic garage splendor that We Are Dios could use more of. ‘Wheel’ appears to be driving itself off a cliff with a jammy middle looking for a soloist but veers just in time and uses the vocal as the solo before shifting gears and bringing the harmonies to fore … at the expense of the guitarists. There’s some really fine, fun guitaring going on here that is almost constantly forced into a subservient role, which is a mistake because Dios works best when the vocalists harmonize with the guitars and not just one another.

We Are Dios is well-sequenced album if anyone other than musicians cares about that sort of thing anymore. It’s begins on a Townshend note (I kept waiting for Daltry to tell me he could see for miles … well, really what I kept waiting for was Keith Moon pounding on his kit) and ends on one of Kaukonen’s. In between there’s a lively inventiveness that if you give yourself enough time to acquire a taste for will take root in your brain just like those vegetables Zappa used to call.