A Beech Landing's 'Better By Design' grounds psychedelia in grit and grace

Psychedelic music isn’t always about going full technicolour, sometimes it’s about watching reality bend ever so slightly at the edges. On their latest offering 'Better By Design', Margate's A Beech Landing trade acid-drenched chaos for something more restrained, yet just as hallucinatory.

From the outset, 'Better By Design' wears two coats at once. There’s the shimmer of classic psychedelia, with its woozy guitar tones that slink and stretch like they’ve been caught in a lava lamp. But cutting through that haze is something heavier, something more rooted. Gritty reverb-laced textures rise to the surface, grounding the song in a kind of realism that keeps its head in the clouds, but its boots firmly in the dirt.

Where early psych-rock often revelled in joyful dissonance, A Beech Landing show rare restraint. Each layer feels considered, each distortion dialled in rather than maxed out. Even as the soundscape begins to buckle and bloom, there’s an undercurrent of control that keeps it all from floating away.

Lyrically, the song offers little in the way of escapism. After all, this is modern psychedelia, not the flower-power fantasy of yesteryear. There’s space for reflection here, even as the walls start to melt.

'Better By Design' is also aptly named. It’s psychedelic music by architecture. Every choice feels deliberate in order to create a specific kind of mood that is introspective, slightly off-kilter, and full of tension between earth and ether.

A Beech Landing isn’t reinventing the genre, but they’re certainly refining it. In an age of oversaturation, 'Better By Design' is a reminder that the most mind-expanding music just needs to be lucid in its own language.