When I was a little kid, my local fish and chip shop had a video arcade machine to keep restless children quiet while their parents waited for their greasy cod. The only game that I ever played on it was Street Fighter 2 of course, but I think there were also some Raiden-style game and a couple of other shooters. More intriguingly, at least to pre-jaded teenager Cianan, was the message that popped up before every game, complete with the hilariously out-of-place stars and stripes motif, informing you that "Winners Don't Do Drugs".

Of course, like any teenager who liked rock music and rebellion, I didn't take that advice too seriously, but apparently Pink Mountaintops paid even less attention to the well-intentioned warning than I did. The music on "Axis of Evol" is druggy, sludgy, and psychedelic it sounds like a whole Colombian harvest has gone into its production. For lovers of psychedelic music, this will be an absolute treat, and for everybody else, the combination of 80s New York indie rock and modern-day Canadian nü-folk should prove to be a combination that is interesting, at least.

The best description that I could possibly give to this music is that it sounds like what would happen if a couple of clean-living lo-fi folk singers were tricked into eating some hash cookies. Stephen McBean, the brains behind this entire affair, proves on songs like Slaves that he has the skills to produce some seriously psychedelic music, that not only sounds trippy, but are decent songs in other ways too. On other songs like Cold Criminals, McBean brings to mind bands like The Velvet Underground, and New Drug Queens sounds almost like Thurston Moore is behind that guitar.

While most of the songs here are pretty decent as individual pieces, they don't really hang well together as a complete album, though. I almost felt like I was listening to a B-Sides compilation in some parts, as the songs don't seem to have any real relation to each other. The only sequencing that I did enjoy were Comas and How Can We Get Free, which bookend the album with some seriously melancholy, downhearted style.

To it's credit, Pink Mountaintops never pushes the drugs line too hard, and none of the songs here require the consumption of a large amount of hallucinogens to enjoy. For lovers of lo-fi indie rock and those who miss the psychedelic era, this album will be a winner. For the rest of us, it depends how well you can cope with the lack of any unifying theme, and the peculiar mixture of influences that are on display here.