The Edgar Broughton Band’s third, self-titled, album kicks off with such a majestic, barnstorming track that it’s impossible for anything else on the album to follow it. ‘Evening Over Rooftops’ is that track and it takes a firm hold on your most sensitive parts, throws you against the nearest wall and refuses to relinquish its grip until you have succumbed to its five minutes and two seconds of brilliance.
Indeed, nothing else on “The Meat Album”* lives up to this starter for ten, but that’s not to say the rest isn’t any cop. Quite the opposite in fact. It keeps you pinned against the wall throughout, just in case you were entertaining ideas of slipping quietly away.
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album reviews, freak rock, prog rock
Whilst doing a spot of research on Bill Graham – celebrated rock promoter who ran the legendary underground venues, the Fillmore West and the Winterland in San Francisco and the Fillmore East in New York – I came across this site, The Psychedelic Art Exchange.
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news, psychedelic rock
Kevin Ayers’s Joy of a Toy does its best to defy the pigeon-hole. Just how do you begin to describe it? Pastoral? Folk? Psychedelic? Progressive? Avant Garde?… Well it contains elements of all these things and more.
Released in 1969, the debut release from the ex-Soft Machine vocalist and bass player takes the title of one of his former group’s songs and opens a window onto a world that is uniquely English.
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album reviews, prog rock, psych-folk, psychedelic rock
When it came to psychedelic and acid rock, Country Joe and the Fish were one of the foremost acts on the American circuit. As was the case with many of the American bands they were steeped in folk roots and this naturally gave their music a more political edge, making them prime movers on the protest scene.
That’s no better demonstrated than on the anti-Vietnam war anthem, ‘I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die’, taken from the sincere but patchy 1967 album of the same name. Unlike many of his peers, Country Joe McDonald wasn’t just content to spout crypto-revolutionary soundbites from the comfort of whatever mansion he was staying in that week; he actually made the effort to get involved at the grass roots level of the protest movement, a move that would see him placed on Richard Nixon’s infamous ‘enemy list’ alongside the likes of Paul Newman, Jane Fonda and John Lennon.
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psychedelic rock, song reviews
It’s always a great pleasure to come home and find the latest issue of the splendid Shindig! magazine on the doormat. The May – June issue is, indeed, now available.
So what can the thinking man expect from the new Shindig?
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news
What’s this? Why on earth is the bearded chicken-botherer gracing these pages? Is Head Full of Snow really that desperate for something to put up at the weekend?
Maybe… But wait! This isn’t your normal Kenny Rogers. This is Kenny Rogers smacked off his tits on some hallucinogenic, psychedelic sound, whilst idling on a kaleidoscopic duvet.
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music vid, psych-pop
This is where it all started for Roy Wood and The Move, with their debut album simply titled, The Move, recorded on and off over a 14 month period and finally released in 1968.
Okay, it might seem unfair to single out Roy Wood, as The Move were – at the time of recording, at least – Carl Wayne, Bev Bevan, Trevor Burton and Chris ‘Ace’ Kefford, but being the creative whirlwind responsible for the lion’s share of their songs, the two are, and always will be, inextricably linked. Even if nowadays you are more likely to think of Christmas at the mention of his name.
But back to the album, here presented in another expanded, digipack reissue by Fly Records. This one’s a lavish two-disc affair with the usual, informative booklet, and featuring on disc one the original mono album as it was released in April 1968, complete with bonus tracks of the single A and B-sides that didn’t feature. Disc two is called ‘New Movement’ and is a newly created stereo mix of the original album with a slightly different track listing and a couple of alternate versions.
Well that’s all well and good, but is it any cop?
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album reviews, psych-pop, psychedelic rock
Photo by: Mick Rock
Psychedelic music, be it of the rock or slightly more flowery pop variety, is thoroughly adept when it comes to throwing out a haunting tune. For example, just take Pink Floyd’s ‘Julia Dream’, John Wonderling’s ‘Man of Straw’, H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘White Ship’ or Peter Thorogood’s aptly named ‘Haunted’ – mere examples of a musical genre that often excelled in sending a shiver up the old spine. Syd Barrett’s ‘Golden Hair’, based on a poem by James Joyce, is two minutes worth of ethereal eeriness that for me evokes images of a twilight cottage at the edge of a dark, dark wood, sometime in 1969. Don’t ask.
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psych-folk, song reviews
Many has been the night when yours truly has lay awake wondering just what it would be like to have a BBC Radio 2 celebration of the studio work of the mighty Roy Wood. (Radio! Remember that?)
Image from: BBC.co.uk
Well it seems my prayers are to be answered this Easter Monday (13th April 2009) when, like the unexpected return of another devotee of beard and flowing locks this weekend, BBC Radio 2 shines the light on Roy Wood in The Record Producers.
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news, prog rock, psychedelic rock
The first thing that strikes you about Traffic’s Mr. Fantasy is the album cover. A red-hued photograph of the band avoiding a hard day’s graft in the rustic Berkshire cottage where the album came to fruition, whilst watching a peculiar harlequin/marrionette figure sat before the fireplace. Presumably the Mr. Fantasy of the title.
It’s a cover that mixes the cosiness of a countryside cottage offering protection from the elements, with a suggestion of the hallucinatory uneasiness associated with the darker aspects of late 60s drug culture.
But that’s just the cover, what about the ruddy recording?
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album reviews, psychedelic rock
The world of prog rock has never shied away from the important things in life. Such as social comment; some spaced out, acid-soaked wierdness; a prolonged guitar solo; and the ability to grow a beard of note. Here are some of prog rock’s illuminati, who have taken it upon themselves to demonstrate that man is not judged by razor alone.
The Edgar Broughton Band
An absolute barnstormer of a band, sporting barnstorming beards. Warwick’s own The Edgar Broughton Band set out to prove there was legs in that old adage: “Why settle for one beard, when you can just as easily have three?” Or four, dependant on the line-up. Rob and Steve Broughton, HFoS salutes thee.
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feature, prog rock
The End’s one and only album, Introspection, may have fallen along the wayside following its much delayed 1969 release but in the intervening years up until its CD reissue it acquired a certain amount of mystique amongst lovers of psychedelia. This was as a result of the Rolling Stones connections the album enjoyed, having none other than Bill Wyman on production duties.
Partially recorded at the same time as the Stones were recording Their Satanic Majesties Request one might be forgiven for expecting to hear a powerhouse of psychedelic rock; a companion piece to the Stones’ album.
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album reviews, psych-pop
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