Consuming the Tangible

I’m going to tentatively list Dungeon Vision, the latest from Berlin-based garage psych duo Earth Tongue, in the “Best of 2026” grouping for now. Bold move for my first 2026 release review, but I’ve had the record for about a month, and it has all the earmarks of what I’ve come to love about the sound: blissfully fuzzed out guitars, heaps of ’60s-influenced melodies, and some sweet, sweet harmony vocals, very much in line with what I’d expect from any production in which my man Ty Segall has dipped his hand.

Take the opening title track, which relays all the sonic information required to understand what Dungeon Vision is doling out. There’s a hefty amount of doom in the duo’s sound, and Segall had them record directly to tape to achieve a more organic, full soundstage. The guitars rumble, the drums snap and occupy the widest of spaces. Vocalist/guitarist Gussie Larkin and drummer Ezra Simons hone in on thick, single melodic lines on rockers like “Demon Cam” and early highlight “Flashlight,” which sounds maybe a little more like a Ty Segall track than it should.

That doom slant to the group’s sound pervades the lyrics, too. I’ve been working on my active, dedicated listening and that includes something I don’t normally do: following along to the lyrics, if available. The vinyl (a lovely cream yellow, another slam dunk from In The Red Records) does in fact have them, and everything from being trapped in a dark dungeon with…something, to what reads like a loose, shaggy narrative about someone chained up for supposedly witchy or demonic inclinations, paints a picture of an unreliable narrator vacillating between their own madness and a potential pact with darker magic.

With the closing minutes of the also very Segall-influenced “Ritual” I’m left with an album that definitely has a signature to its sound, but that signature fades together with Segall and other like-minded artists (the auto-play on my most recent listen segued into a song from Wand’s exquisite 2015 release Golem and it sounded like a perfect continuation). Is that a bad thing? As I get older my memory feels like a cluttered attic, albums and movies mixed in with my life, the accumulated dust becoming a network of synapses firing off connections between things that wouldn’t otherwise be linked. I’ve yet to check out Earth Tongue’s earlier work — I’ve read 2024’s Great Haunting takes a more raucous turn, so I see no reason why I shouldn’t continue down this twisted path to more garage-punk goodness.