The two full-lengths from Wisconsin-to-California duo Peaking Lights make the band alumni of both the Night-People and Not Not Fun labels. If you find that part of their biography a bit incomprehensible, you may also be unaware that their 2011 full-length, 936, was something of a triumph among the subset of grassroots music fans who still buy cassettes. Peaking Lights are currently at the heart of a new crop of underground, psychedelic pop groups. Their primitive sun worship is underpinned by a murky foundation of dub and drone, the layers filtered through the aural equivalent of a Xerox machine. You feel as if you are listening in on Peaking Lights, and their mantric hit “All the Sun That Shines” has always reminded me of a description the poet Allen Ginsberg once offered of Arthur Russell: “Buddhist bubblegum.”
— I reviewed two Peaking Lights remix collections for Pitchfork.
