“Oh great!” I thought to myself as my editor handed me an advance CD-R of the new Dark Fog release the other day, “Another Chicago psych record. This is going to suck!” Over the past few years, this town’s music scene has been hit with an overwhelming number of psychedelic acts. If you’re going out to a rock show these days, there’s a good chance that you’re going to see at least one of them. There is a wide array of quality in these bands, from the unfuckwithable classics (like Plastic Crimewave Sound) to the rock-solid new kids (Verma, for example) all the way down to the utter crap (ahem, Great Society Mind Destroyers). To be honest, most bands like this seem to settle into the latter end of the psychedelic spectrum. I was completely expecting this Dark Fog CD, which is getting the self-released treatment this weekend, to fall into the faceless void of its peers, something that tends to happen to bands who wave the psych flag as adamantly as these guys do. I gave the Dark Fog CD a spin, though, and was pleasantly surprised to find that it wasn’t totally horrible. Hell, it’s pretty good.