You should take your shoes off when you enter a space garden.
Or at least, that’s how we feel at Above the Crowds when listening to Mandrake Handshake’s Earth-Sized Worlds.
Cool, but what’s a space garden? And why are we suddenly taking our shoes off? Good questions. Probably fair ones.
Actually, the band themselves call it Space Beach. “A place where the sea joins the sky, the trees touch the stars,” and Mandrake Handshake invite you to stay for a while. But after spending time with the album, we see ourselves walking through a strange, colourful garden where every riff has flowers, synth reverb comes from another planet, and every little sound detail is hiding behind a leaf waiting for you to notice it.
So, Earth-Sized Worlds is a psych record? Yes, indeed.
Mandrake Handshake are an Oxford and London collective that varies from 7 to 10 members. They describe their sound as “Flowerkraut” and even though we had to research what that meant, it does track:
-Playful ear candy decoration and sun-dazed psych-pop energy? Flower check.
-Locked-in grooves, the forward motion, the feeling that the song might keep walking long after you’ve stopped listening? Kraut check.
The album opens with “Time Goes Up”, and it immediately transports us to their particular universe. It also immediately reminds us of King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard’s “The River”, where the groove takes your hand and says, yes, this way. High praise, well deserved.
“Hypersonic Super-Asterid” is probably the clearest summary of what the album does to you. It has the cool riffs, the bright vocals and ear candy everywhere. It is big, colourful, generous, and always has something pulling you forward. Same goes for “The Change and the Changing”. Let us live in that guitar riff, please.
“King Cnut” carries more weight. The synth and guitar sit high in the air, but the vocals have more gravitas, and maybe even a stranger, sexier pull. It takes you by the hand, but this time it is not just showing you the garden. It is leading you deeper into it.
That balance is what makes Earth-Sized Worlds more than a cool psych record to have in the background, though it absolutely works as that too. You can let it play while doing something else and still enjoy the colour, the movement, the very generous amount of vibe. But the album keeps calling for your attention. It keeps leaving things around for you to find. And the more you give it, the more it gives back.
By the time the closing title track arrives, it feels like the moment when you finally step back and look at the whole garden you have been walking through. All the strange plants, glowing corners, overgrown paths and tiny details suddenly belong to the same place. Not because everything has been neatly explained, but because the album has quietly taught you how to move through it.
There is something very human about that. For all its cosmic language, all its comets, beaches, gardens, synths and spacey decorations, Earth-Sized Worlds feels handmade.
And maybe that is why “Space Beach” becomes, at least for us, a space garden. Beaches are open. Gardens are grown. Beaches are places you arrive at. Gardens are places someone has cared for, shaped, overfilled, trimmed, ignored for a while, then returned to with more ideas than they had the first time.
That is what this album sounds like.
So yes, this is a great psych record.
And from our humble little corner of the internet, we strongly encourage Mandrake Handshake to keep doing exactly this.
Shoes off, volume up, enter the space garden.
Listen where you listen:
