Supernatural Equinox, the third album by Detroit's Outrageous Cherry, won't be officially released until June 3, but the timing is perfect: The swirling production, wall of guitars and blissful harmonies create the ideal soundtrack for the summer. Matthew Smith, the band's visionary singer, guitarist and songwriter has obviously done his homework, borrowing telltale elements from first generation psychedelia and modernizing them with his own writing prowess. "If You Want Me" opens with a 12-string arpeggio riff that would blare out of AM radios if that air band still played pop music. A basic drumbeat pins a killer chorus of seventh chords and male/female backing vocals. Smith's baritone evokes Robyn Hitchcock in "Saturday Afternoon," where the lyrics transport us back into end-of-the-1960s disenchantment -- a contrast to the shuffle beat and the Mamas and Papas-type harmonies of the rest of the song. From the dreamy sound of those two single-worthy offerings, Supernatural Equinox can shift into heavier territory like with the fuzzed out wah-wah guitars of the title track and "See Through Everything," where heavy echo effects on the piano and vocals give it the kind of warmth that hasn't been felt in a recording since Kramer mixed Galaxie 500's albums. With their last two albums, Outrageous Cherry drew comparisons to the Velvet Underground, likely due to the fact that their drummers have always been female and all have been discouraged from playing cymbals or hi-hats. The approach keeps the sound primal, allowing Carey Gustafson to harmonize while she keeps the beat. But the similarities end there. Supernatural Equinox sounds a lot brighter and fuller than the Velvets especially when lead guitarist Larry Ray cuts loose. Seeing them live should be the perfect way to start your summer.

It's getting so you don't really listen to an Outrageous Cherry CD as much as experience it.

A psychedelic assault on the senses, The Book Of Spectral Projections follows the familiar heavy reverb ethereal vibe of other releases by the Detroit act named after a colour of hair dye. Here, they're going for something a little more grand - namely stretching things out across twenty tracks in what looks like a loose concept album - if the concept is to, hey, freak out.

The band HAS the sound, that's for sure. Take away elements of the production and you have some serious throwback material like The Astral Transit Authority and the closing It's So Nice To Be Here. More interesting are the acoustic numbers, which add a nice bit of variety to proceedings that would otherwise be in danger of sounding like one huge song. It's Only Sorcery verges on an almost Dylan-like folk, while Electric Child Of Witchcraft Rising is of the more melodic variety.

And "melody" is what Matthew Smith and co-horts best deliver. The Unseen Devourers marries an incredibly catchy chorus to the retro formula perfectly while Here Where The Stars Are Cracking Up's breezy sway is another highlight. Oh yeah, there's all kinds of occult imagery as well. With such a strong signature sound, Outrageous Cherry's music finds a pretty selective audience (read "cult"). And it's those that'll treasure The Book Of Spectral Projections most. (* * * out of 5)

Back to the future

"We'd have made a disco record," Matthew Smith of Outrageous Cherry jokes, "but the technology just wasn't there."

Fortunately for Smith, his band and likeminded musicians, the technology to make psychedelic records like Outrageous Cherry's The Book of Spectral Projections is readily available.

Tube amps, fuzz pedals, Hammond organs, sitars and American-made guitars remain the order of the day for the neo-psychedelic.

NOT 'VIBEY'

"There's not a whole lot the new technology has to offer that sounds very vibey to me," Smith shrugs.

"I haven't figured out how to create a mood on a laptop computer that moves me. So I'll stick to guitar."

It's a philosophy that has guided bands on the fringe of America's rock 'n' roll scene since the mid-1960s, when tough-edged groups throughout the continent led a charge in response to squeaky-clean British Invasion bands (and following the lead of Brit outcasts like The Pretty Things, The Yardbirds and The Rolling Stones). Volume was set on stun; faces on sneer.

Back in the day, such rebellious rockers sported names like The Thirteenth Floor Elevators, The Seeds, The Chocolate Watch Band and The Electric Prunes.

Tomorrow night, say hello to Outrageous Cherry, The Asteroid 4, The Grip Weeds and Orange Alabaster Mushroom.

Same train, different time.

FUTURISTIC

"It sounds futuristic to me," a perplexed Smith nonetheless claims. "But I guess my idea of a futuristic sound involves using old instruments." Ultimately, he pleads, "We're just following where the music's going."

The music is currently taking the Detroit-based band to what Smith calls "an interstellar bubblegum concept album," which will mark the band's seventh full-length release later this year. "I'm told this record has some pretty snappy numbers on it," Smith deadpans.

Sometimes, as Scott Vitt of The Asteroid 4 can tell you, the music can take a band to unexpected places. Like Outrageous Cherry and The Grip Weeds, Vitt's band records for the Rainbow Quartz International label. (the Orange Alabaster Mushroom is in fact Greg Watson, formerly of local legends The Knurlings.)

And, also like the above, The Asteroid 4 have firm roots in psychedelia.

But Vitt's veteran band recently steered their car wheels down a gravel road. Destination: The countrified rock 'n' roll vision of Gram Parsons.

"It's really hard to find good, rootsy things happening today," Vitt says of moving from one '60s obsession to another.

"I don't think any of us are really that crazy about any of the alt-country or Americana things out there. There's some good stuff, but it's really hard to find anyone doing it the way we want to hear it.

"If we were still doing psychedelic music, I'd still be rambling off band names from the '60s. Nothing seems to stick with us that long, as far as buying a new record and listening to it over and over again. I mean, it's not like a Dylan album."

PSYCHEDELIA

It's also not like King Richard's Collectibles, the most recent slab of psychedelia detonated by the Asteroids.

But Vitt notes it is important for bands to change and progress with each release in order to keep it interesting both for them and for their listeners.

"We wouldn't really be interested as musicians if we had to keep making the same record over and over again," Vitt insists.

"But sometimes, unfortunately, that's what people want. The difference between the '60s and now is that there weren't as many acts, so if a band was to change their sound every album, it was appreciated. Today it's like, 'Well, we don't want you to sound like that; Beachwood Sparks already sound like that.' But it's just not conducive to anything creative not to try different things."

CLEANSING THE PALATE

Not that the band is necessarily through with psychedelia. Even at their most country, Vitt explains, the Asteroids' music is inevitably filtered through the psychedelia that nurtured the Philadelphia-based fourpiece.

It is, he says, all part of cleansing the palate in preparation for the next serving.

"We're trying to play less and make better songs," Vitt says. "And by going back to more blues, country and folk-influenced stuff, I think once we go back into psychedelic land, we're gonna be much better songwriters.

"If The Beatles and the Stones hadn't been doing Chuck Berry songs first, I guarantee you they wouldn't have been doing the White album and Let It Bleed later."

The Velvet Underground's Eastern modalities were a significant influence on Outrageous Cherry's first album, so it shouldn't come as any great surprise that the band's new release credits not one but two of the musicians with playing an Indian classical instrument. In the nine years since its debut, however, the Detroit-area quartet has diverted its drones to a different purpose. On "Supernatural Equinox," the sitar and tamboura are put into the service of impeccably tuneful psychedelic pop-rock.

This means that such songs as "Girl You Have Magic Inside You" and "Saturday Afternoon" -- which recalls Nixon's resignation, of all things -- are sweet and rather silly. Singer and main songwriter Matthew Smith crafts accessible melodies and layered arrangements, but not everyone will want to follow him beyond what the planet-hopping title track calls "the Venusian blind." The band, which is named after a shade of hair dye, does have a sense of humor, as songs such as "Young and Miserable" testify. But Smith and company take chiming guitars and high harmonies very seriously indeed.

Knocking about long before the White Stripes and Eminem made Detroit a destination city, Outrageous Cherry has issued a steady stream of tuneful psych-pop records that never managed to stir more than a devoted few. Which is puzzling, because the Cherries make it so easy. Matthew Smith has a knack for crafting melodies as warm and wide as the summer sky, and his tendency to smother them in buzzing guitars doesn't undercut their stunning tunefulness. It's like the Byrds with more reverb. Their latest, Supernatural Equinox, arrives just as spring is furiously beating back winter, and its big ringing chords and tie-dyed choruses are just enough to scare away the gray and bring on the endless summer.

For anyone familiar with Matthew Smith only through his affiliation with Detroit's Americana wunderkind Volebeats, Outrageous Cherry's latest full length, Supernatural Equinox, will come as a pleasant paisley-and-acid-drenched surprise. With a psychedelic Pop furor that suggests the Move circa 1967 ("Girl You Have Magic Inside You," "Desperate Times, Desperate Measures") and a sweet melodicism that shivers with Beatlesque chills ("This Evening," "See Through Everything"), Outrageous Cherry folds their trippy influences into a dense and insistent recipe that howls like the Electric Prunes on a Pretty Things tribute with dashes of "See Emily Play"-era Pink Floyd. With Outrageous Cherry, Smith proves that there is most assuredly a difference between retro affectation and authentic sonic homage. Turn on, tune in, dig it.

CityBeat grade: A.

"their most assured to date. At their best when fusing Spacemen 3 feedback and backwards guitar to West Coast smarts, there's enough to suggest there's life out there after all."

Call Matthew Smith the next undiscovered cult from Detroit; his Outrageous Cherry have six albums’ worth of psyche-doused rock and twisted power-pop in their 11-years under the radar. “Supernatural Equinox” the most coherent in their lysergic litany.

Frustratingly, however, while fashion and the band’s own progression to comparatively lucid drone-pop winking towards the Velvets and echoing the Warlocks, offer the Cherry their clearest shot at breaking out, they’re at they’re finest when getting lost in their own psychedelic wormholes. “Orgone Vortex” and “Supernatural Equinox” are majestic excursions in wah-wah splurge, recalling the deep-fried freakouts of Des Damen and 55T-era Screaming Trees. Elsewhere, the Cherry bite a cool drug-pop vibe that’s a tad too chilled to really rock.

On their fifth album, Detroit's Outrageous Cherry mix old-school acid-eaters (Stones, Byrds, Beatles) with modern genre revivalists (Dandy Warhols, Brian Jonestown Massacre), wrapping their noise-pop in a distinctive psychedelic overcoat. There's a well-balanced, seductive ethereality to Supernatural Equinox that's hard to resist. On the sunnier, Beach Boys-influenced tunes like "If You Want Me" and "Saturday Afternoon," vocalist/songwriter Matthew Smith simultaneously pays homage to and parodies the Sixties with lyrics like, "It's 1970 now/Flower Power is dead." On the flip side, OC dose the listener with the intense prog of "Psychic Wheels" and a ferocious wah-wah pedal attack on "The Orgone Vortex." Supernatural Equinox peaks with "See You Next Time," a raga-flavored, extended jam punctuated by processed backing vocals borrowed from Their Satanic Majesty's Request. Turn on, tune in, trip out.

Although most of its users use pot typically for its depressant qualities – that is, to relax – the Drug Enforcement Agency has it classified as a hallucinogen. Psychedelic? Hardly, if stoners have any say in things.

Likewise, the term “psychedelic” is thrown about rather carelessly in regards to music as well as drugs. While just about every pop-playing bunch of indie rockers cites some sort of psychedelic influence, there are few that actually sound like they’ve got more association with psilocybin mushrooms or acid than just a passing affectation with Strawberry Alarm Clock and Jefferson Airplane records.

Outrageous Cherry is the sort of act that’s the real deal. Full of everything from wah-wah pedals and bad-trip distortion to quasi-Eastern overtones with sitar and oddball time signatures, Supernatural Equinox is a two-hits-of-acid album in a world that’s more used to mild marijuana hallucinogens. With a sound that’s drenched in psychedelic traditions, the band toes the psych-rock hard line to deliver a record that wouldn’t sound too out-of-place if it surfaced on Haight and Ashbery in 1971. The band rocks like it’s the early ’70s from a fuzzed-out space guitar and pure psychedelic themes (“Girl, You Have Magic Inside You”), or takes a light, sun-filled trip full of bubblegum vocal melodies and droning bass (“Saturday Afternoon”). Even when the act eases off its head-trip sounds, things are distinctly more tripped-out than their psychedelic counterparts, with fuzzy guitars and noodling that sits somewhere between acid-jazz mess arounds and a trip through the looking glass.

Cherry’s dedication to the hard-and-fast psychedelic is pretty cool, but it comes with a heavy tradeoff: Supernatural Equinox is tied, sonically as well as ideologically, to the days of acid and bell bottoms. There’s no attempt at innovation on this record at all – that’s what gives it its distinct flavor, after all – but there’s no mistaking the fact that the band’s nostalgic for an era long gone.

Supernatural Equinox

Another slice of Outrageous Cherry pie for you. A pulsing, ebbing, slice of gothic Velvet-esque sunshiny space pop just like they deal it up for you in rock ’n’ roll hotbeds like Outrageous Cherry’s hometown of Detroit. No doubt a light show is part (or at least should be) of Outrageous Cherry’s stage show. Volume I would think to be the other necessary ingredient. Broody but bodacious baby. Get it down on the street this May. (13 tracks. 51:17 playing time.)

Revealing the depth of his devotion to rock 'n' roll, Matthew Smith is in a record store when he answers his cellphone in Iowa City. The local time is five minutes to 6, and the Outrageous Cherry singer-guitarist is feverishly rifling the bins just before the shop closes.

What makes Smith's quest for vinyl admirable is that the Detroit garage kingpin and his three bandmates have had a hellish day. Kicking off a North American tour that brings them to the Brickyard on Monday (April 26), they've spent a full eight hours on the road in a packed van. Finding food was supposed to be priority number one when they finally pulled off the interstate. Instead they saw a record store, at which point resistance was futile.

After politely asking if he can call back, Smith phones the Georgia Straight 10 minutes later sounding like a man who's just hit gold. "I found a Pete Barton record and a Hatfield and the North record," the singer says excitedly. "There's nothing better than being on the freeway after eight hours, getting out of your car, and walking right into a record store."

The fact that Smith is jacked up about discovering records by a lifelong footnote (Barton's résumé includes Lieutenant Pigeon, Cavern, and the Swinging Blue Jeans) and an obscure '70s prog outfit (Hatfield and the North) is a tip-off that he's fascinated by rock 'n' roll history. That's further borne out by Outrageous Cherry's most recent album, Supernatural Equinox. Sounding every bit as retro as a Nuggets box set, the disc overflows with acid-blot guitars, Sunshine Superman vocals, and Velvet Underground indebted drums. What's most astonishing, though, is the slavish sonic devotion to a time the band members never knew. With its sitar flourishes and kaleidoscopic vocals, "Girl You Have Magic Inside You" is '60s pychedelia in its purest form. "A Song for Someone Sometimes" is two minutes of harmony-drenched, paisley-pop heaven, and "The Orgone Vortex" gives you a good idea what was going on in Syd Barrett's head when he took off for the dark side of the moon.

Such tracks make Smith, the band's songwriter, seem like he came of age in the summer of love, but his roots are actually implanted in the fiercely underground Detroit garage-rawk scene. Motor City royalty, he's played guitar for foul-mouthed bluesman Andre Williams, produced Jack White's pre-White Stripes band Go, and done time in the Dirtbombs. For all his street cred, however, Smith has sometimes felt like a misfit with Outrageous Cherry, which has released five albums to date, most of them with obscure American indies.

"I like all the records that we've done, but I've sort of felt alienated because of the kind of music we play," he says. "I've always had people asking me, 'Why do you have to use so much reverb and echo? Why do you have to be weird? You're making rock 'n' roll. Why can't you be normal?' I was always like, 'If I wanted to be normal, I'd have done something other than make rock 'n' roll records.' "

Thanks to fellow Detroit garage rawkers like the Von Bondies, the Sights, and, of course, the White Stripes, Outrageous Cherry's retro obsessions are now seen as a bonus. Smith says that for years, he found himself playing to the same small, incestuous group of scenesters in his hometown and on the road. That started to change when the success of Jack and Meg turned Detroit into the new-millennium equivalent of early-'90s Seattle. Although Supernatural Equinox is on Rainbow Quartz--not exactly a multinational operation with the kind of promotional resources that make records into hits--Outrageous Cherry has suddenly found itself an in-demand commodity, and not just among obsessive record collectors.

"Anyone trying to do music in Detroit was always broke," Smith says. "We come from a community that, for years and years, only a small group in the city paid attention to. Now we're reaching more people, not just at home, but across the country. I'm not surprised by that. If anything, I'm surprised that what we've been doing in Detroit has been obscure for so long."