Psych Rock In The Possum House

Acid Mothers Temple + The Macks
Mercury Lounge
November 5, 2025

Mercury Lounge might have neon John Moreland and Zach Bryan signs on their walls, but don’t think that excludes this venue from Tulsa’s musical eclecticism. The bar known for Americana and roots rock played host to Japanese psychedelic legends Acid Mothers Temple last Wednesday. 

Part krautrock, part jam band, part noise, Acid Mothers Temple have often been mistaken for a religious cult—which they are not. But they are every bit a cult band, one that inhabits a zone of its own and tends to draw more fanatics than fans. Formed in Japan in the mid-’90s by guitarist Makoto Kawabata¹, they emerged from a scene inspired by Can and Hawkwind, devoted to “extreme trip music” that blends psych, drone, space rock, and noise. Their extensive catalog—live recordings, collaborations, official releases, and bootlegs—could become your life, and for the Tulsa fanatics I know, their appearance at Mercury was a confounding surprise.

Opening band The Macks, new to me, have punny song titles and slightly cartoonish merch, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. Their smart rhythmic sleight of hand and stop-gap misdirection was far more Escher than Disney. An opening keyboard salvo of Kraftwerkian arpeggios lulled the audience into its vamp before the full band ripped into the pattern mid-sentence and scrambled the crowd’s headbanging in a rhythmic bait and switch. 

Frontman Sam Fulwiler headed the band with a lackadaisical Stone Roses/serial-killer posturing that was hilarious when contrasted against The Macks’ angular, polyrhythmic wizardry. They’re doing psychedelic music through sheer force of rhythmic interplay and ferocity; lesser garage-psych bands only make it home from the pawn shop with their first delay pedal and stop there. I guess they’re from Portland, but I immediately thought they were Australian, and it’s because they made me think of Total Control, not … those other Australian garage-psych guys.

The Acid Mothers Temple soundcheck was psychedelic in itself, with a long session of reverbed guitar plodding that sounded like Syd Barrett listening to Exile on Main Street outtakes, laid over delayed choruses of vocal yelps that replaced the usual “check one, check two” on the microphone. Psych check done, they erupted into an a-melodic full-band blast reminiscent of countrymen Melt-Banana, before coalescing into a heavy, stop-start Laurel Canyon groove with the keyboardist’s theremin/synth stylings layered on top of the chaotic noise-rock the signaled the set’s true arrival.

Fuck flower power. This was flower violence, a buildup that ran straight off a cliff into a full doom drop-off—a drowning minor-key fistfight on fumes that landed gracefully into a lake of lava-lamp viscosity and Pink Floydian interspace.

A violin-bow-on-guitar interlude sounded like “Whole Lotta Love” through Eraserhead’s brain. A hi-hat came tiptoeing in like a cat burglar jimmying a window open to the night, with an ominous bass swell heralding an accelerando that brought us into a krautrocking motorik beat reminiscent of The Macks’ own fury. They built and built their sound through percussive speed, then settled into melodic guitar spirals worthy of The Cure—cyclonic yet calm, icy yet cozy. And then they built it up again, through a lazy accelerando that brought the swirling chords and omnipresent theremin/synth into a four-on-the-floor disco beat, soaring into the release the song promised.

And then: they rocked. How many psychic trips end with a fizz and not a bang? This was like the full night of antics in Dazed and Confused, until the protagonist finally got home to put on his headphones and listen to his tunes. Acid Mothers Temple ended their set by returning to that gorgeous, icy guitar picking they’d been building the whole time, with the Japanese guitar master Kawabata ripping psychedelic leads all over it. I experienced the evening as one long, immersive sonic exploration, but a post-show blog post by Kawabata revealed the actual track list as a meandering sequence intermittently held together by different iterations of “Pink Lady Lemonade” (a track which some fans hypothesize has dozens of different official versions; as I said, this band can indeed be your life).

In the same post, Kawabata remarked on the decor of Mercury Lounge, with its various taxidermied animals and WWF pinball machine with a painting of Hulk Hogan that looked “rather amusing.” The post brought me back to Mercury that night and the interesting mix of people experiencing these Japanese psych gods under a neon “Big Bad Luv” sign. There were people from the noise scene, death metal fans, and plenty of Mercury roots rock regulars who were treated to this inter-global experience by sheer luck of the barfly’s draw. 

Improbable encounters like this are what living on Tulsa time is truly about.