The High Violets

For a young musician, the weirdest trouble with having hippies for parents may be when some subliminally absorbed influence from childhood shows up in a song. Oops! Ergo “Fa,” the second track on this Portland quartet’s seven-song mini album, which sounds an awful lot like some Cocteau Twins rewrite of the Grateful Dead epic “Dark Star” might. It’s not bad; thickets of guitars thrumming and strummed, over which the double-tracked soprano of Kaitlyn ni Donovan floats ethereally, make for fine driving music, albeit over familiar ground. And while the Violets apparently have listened to a good portion of the 4AD catalog (and maybe a bit of prenatal Dead), their execution is harder-edged, with droney and wah-wah’d guitars and the kind of creepy post-Manson (Chucky, not Shirley) vocals I recall a ’70s-vintage Stockton flying saucer cult’s attempt at rock ’n’ roll evangelism sounded like. Yep, trippy.