As our world accelerates towards Idiocracy like a Mustang GTO on a beer-and-cigarettes run to the 7-11 at 10:59, it is difficult to differentiate Sanity from Insanity and losing your mind becomes not a worry but a forgone conclusion that one may as well embrace because it’s, you know, going to happen someday. The soundtrack playing behind our mental decline should be Jack Tate and The Satisfactions’ “Lose Your Mind,” a high-energy cosmic buzz of excellently executed guitar riffs and edgy vocals ricocheting off the mentally permeable walls of 60’s psychedelia. Listen to “Lose Your Mind” while sipping an apricot cider smuggled out of Portland and contemplating whether anyone will notice when your mind slips over the edge or perhaps whether it’s already plunged into the chasm and you haven’t notice but everyone else has.

“Lose Your Mind” is all about guitars, one layered beneath the next, each presenting a distinct reverby riff that could carry the track. Piled together the guitars create a wall of sound that says, “Hey, put down whatever it is you’re picking up and listen to this.” But the true North Star of “Lose Your Mind” is the lead vocal that careens through the track with an abandon rarely seen in these End Times when being cool means you’ve purchased a better Fortnite dance than the loser in the next cubicle whose only redeemable quantity is his mastery of Facebook.

Longtime readers of this massive tome know that the paragraph following the Bandcamp thingy is reserved for the Obscure Reference, in which we attempt to demonstrate that all of those songs of the 60’s that we’ve stored in our brain have not yet been displaced by reruns of The Office (American version) and W1A (brilliant, yes, no, very good). The obvious comparison is to the 13th Floor Elevators’ “You’re Gonna Miss Me” owing to the vocal style, energy, and subject matter of “Lose Your Mind” compared to the fate of Roky Erickson. I feel that’s not quite obscure enough for both of my readers (if we count the cat who, now that I think about it, perhaps should be counted nine times). Well, you and the cat are just going to have to settle for “You’re Gonna Miss Me” because I have to be somewhere in thirty minutes and I’m not going to go through every song in my library trying to find the source of that third guitar riff that sounds kinda like “Rebel Rouser.”

“Lose Your Mind” is from Jack Tate and The Satisfactions new eponymous 13-song LP. And if I ever write eponymous again, please send a cargo shorts-wearing hipster to my house with instructions to rip that coveted Music Press card from the hatband of my Fedora. I don’t know much about this band, though I have a feeling that I should. I know they play live dates, and I know Jack Tate is an excellent musician. He has a video on Instagram playing Debussy’s “Arabesque No.1.” What? No, not on the spoons, on a piano. The album has the feel of a one-guy-plays-all-the-instruments project though I’m probably wrong. At any rate, it’s a good album and you should listen to it.

You can support deserving independent musicians like Jake Tate and The Satisfactions by visiting their Bandcamp page, listening to their songs, and downloading your favorite tracks. And be sure to follow Jack Tate and The Satisfactions om Facebook and Instagram.