It’s a thought, or perhaps even a concept, to create music that is evocative of the past if you take care to invent, or perhaps even have fun, songs that are filled with the kind of skewed hope that the ghosts of the sixties once wanted us all to worship. Dr Cosmo’s Tape Lab – a duo of dubious incarnation from Glasgow – have drawn deep from the joint of mercurial reinvention and turned their album “Ever Evolving Lab” simultaneously into a gleeful homage to the true gods that were the Kinks and the Beach Boys and the false gods that were Pink Floyd.
Their guitars run backwards through “The Secret of the Tibetan Grapefruit” as if a better tomorrow were an achievable target and no less a deity than Brian Wilson would surely smile upon the end of summer melancholy that leads “Trading Time” into the sunset. With full on quirkiness, Dr Cosmo’s Tape Lab throw in some Ray Davies to season “Animal Man” and make it a near irresistible reason to sing, dance and praise the past but, saving the best for last, the positively uplifting “Alphabetter Boogie” sends you off with, glory be, a smile upon your face.
It is true that Dr Cosmo’s Tape Lab sound like they have stepped out of a Tardis from the sixties but, given that they clearly know their way around a pop song, we should be grateful for that and offer them copious quantities of class A drugs in the hope that they might stick around for a while.