This is what summer should sound like

Hello, summer. Perpetual rays of sunshine and blue skies, warm ocean waters, tradewinds delight. Ripe for poetry, love, windows down while driving, backyard barbecues with friends. Sunshine. Lazy days. Peering up at palm fronds, napping on the beach below. If summer is more than just a good tune, it’s a soundtrack that carries us off into the horizon as the sun drifts downward at the end of each day, lulling us into our endless summerdom.

I thought about sending you off into this summer with a list of essential albums I’ve been listening to lately, but then this beauty landed at my doorstep, and it just about trumps everything else I wanted to share with you. If there really were a soundtrack to this dreamy disposition we now find ourselves in, my vote says its Psychemagik’s latest compilation, Magik Sunset Part One — and not just for the cover art, although that alone could enrapture the mind with its paradisiacal eventide imagery. The colors painted by the songs contained within this stunning gatefold double LP conjure just the same. Paradise found in summer’s every sunset, enlightening us as we gaze into the gradient of yellow-orange-red, feeling up high whilst the sun draws lower its path to tomorrow.

Dizzying waves of slow heat escape from each track on Magik Sunset to obscure what was important yesterday but is now a faint cry of responsibility from the real world, the place that doesn’t know what summer is. What it should be. At least Magik‘s compiler, Danny McLewin, knows what summer should sound like: nostalgic, slow burning, driving, carefree, unbound by time.

Danny McLewin writes in the liner note: “This music is destined for those who see beyond the pale and whose horizons are greeted with open arms of music as a universal healing force, not a private affair.”

To listen to Magik Sunset Part One in Hawaii, then, is to welcome the enchanting embrace of summer, surrendering our senses whole to the natural beauty of our islands accompanied by a soundtrack befitting this backdrop of what many call paradise.

Highlights include:

Mother Funk, Sunshine // Jack Adkins, American Sunset // The Electric Connection, Groovy // P’Cock, Telephone Song // Bobby Brown, My Hawaiian Home

Listen to Magik Sunset Part One now at lengrecords.bandcamp.com.

Roger recently turned his blog, Aloha Got Soul, into a record label: alohagotsoul.com.