Cut in 1969, this self-titled album feels like the first fully immersive psychedelic rock statement from its own scene. At a time when local airwaves were ruled by polite pop and lightweight fare, Churchills arrived riding waves of fuzz and twisting studio gear to its limits. The lineup itself tells the story. Frontman Stan Solomon brought a raw, soulful presence; guitarist Robb Huxley carried deep experience of the classic rock songbook, its riff language and studio tricks. Alongside them, guitarist and mandolin player Haim Romano, bassist Michael “Miki” Gavrielov and drummer Ami Trebich supplied the band’s internal spark, folding Mediterranean phrasing and Levantine rhythm into the wiring. Together they built songs where West Coast-style psychedelia collides with modal melodies and dance figures that could only have come from their own streets and gatherings. The result is not pastiche but collision: searing solos and echo-laden organs cutting across haunted ballads, garage snarls and passages that border on proto-prog, all of it marked by a slight melodic slant that feels unmistakably non-Anglo.

In the studio, Churchills treated tape as another instrument. Guitars are saturated into wild, singing distortion; drums punch through with almost punk directness; voices swim in reverb and delay that feel less like decoration than like a map of the band’s dislocation, singing to an imagined international audience from a small, charged room. The songs veer between hook-heavy psych-pop and darker, more exploratory pieces, united by a sense that the band is pushing their environment - musical, social, even technical - as far as it will go. It has the immediacy and imagination of the best underground records of 1969, but refracted through a different sky and a different set of pressures. Long difficult to find in its original pressing, Churchills now returns on vinyl in a carefully prepared edition. The new version is cut from the original master tapes, restoring the depth and bite of a mix that bootlegs and needle-drops could only hint at.