Well, it is Halloween, so what better than a horrifying mix of prog, psych and folk to blow the cobwebs from your proverbial tombstones?

Sometimes (ahem) terrifying, sometimes spooky, other times just plain weird. It’s a tricky treat, all the way.

Press play and prepare for a scare. (Track list below)

[See post to listen to audio]

^{Comus – Diana (from First Utterance)}

^{Kevin Ayers – Song From the Bottom of a Well (from whatevershebringswesing)}

^{Kaleidoscope – The Murder of Lewis Tollani (from Tangerine Dream)}

^{Dr. Z – Evil Woman’s Manly Child (from Three Parts to My Soul)}

^{The Dog That Bit People – Reptile Man (from The Dog That Bit People)}

^{Skin Alley – Graveyard Shuffle (from Two Quid Deal?)}

^{Magnet – Maypole (from The Wicker Man OST)}

^{Names & Faces – The Killer}

^{Caravan – C’thlu Thlu (from For Girls That Grow Plump in the Night)}

^{The Alan Parsons Project [feat. Arthur Brown] – The Tell-Tale Heart (from Tales of Mystery and Imagination)}

^{H.P. Lovecraft – At the Mountains of Madness (from HP Lovecraft II)}

^{Beggars Opera – The Witch (from Pathfinder)}

^{Pink Floyd – Jugband Blues (from A Saucerful of Secrets)}

If this has tickled your fancy, The HFoS Prog Rock Summer Mixtape and HFoS Goes to Toytown are also available.

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They don’t come much more arcane than this slice of 1977 acid folk. It began life as a private pressing of just 200 vinyl copies, which was then circulated among a selective audience. Far out!

Shot through with a lyrical bitterness that underlines Janaway’s apparent disgust with this mess of a world, through painfully crafted metaphor and the minimalist acid folk sound he employs, Puritanical Odes is six acoustic songs (entitled ‘Odes’ A to E and ‘Labour Pains’) performed on the 12-string guitar. There is no accompaniment other than the occasional haunting choral shriek and disconcerting bursts of erratic feedback.

As I said, miserable bastard! Which suits HFoS fine; we too are a hotbed of discontent and barely suppressed misanthropic rage.

Not really one to get the party going with a bang, Puritanical Odes is one man’s journey to the edge of darkness and the devastation that lies beyond. Janaway offers little in the way of hope throughout… in fact, scrub that; Janaway offers nothing in the way of hope, such is the pessimistic vibe that permeates every last note and every last word uttered in his rich and twilight timbre. But this isn’t an album about hope.

Puritanical Odes voices a frustration with life at an intensely personal level. Such was its limited pressing and method of distribution, one wonders whether something so abstractly intimate was ever intended to be heard by a wider public. The sketchy liner notes, supplied by Janaway himself, noticeably avoid mentioning the album altogether, instead offering a bio that briefly touches upon where his head may have been at the time of recording.

Still, Puritanical Odes is never a difficult listen, which is testament to Janaway’s skill as a musician and the searing complexity of his 12-string compositions. It’s certainly not for everyone, but within the framework of the 1970′s folk lexicon it provides a chilling counterpoint to the sanguine sojourns put out by the less cynical, hippified contingent.

As unsettling as Comus’s First Utterance, though at a deeper, more cerebral level, Puritanical Odes is well worth a listen, though maybe not as a fireside, autumnal warmer.

*^{Chance would be a fine thing. Instead of delicate grey mists and chilly mornings, we are presently nudging melting point with some of the hottest weather October has ever seen.}

Puritanical Odes by Bruce Janaway is reissued by Sunbeam Records and available to buy from Amazon.co.uk

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Originally released in 1971, Tudor Lodge is as pleasant as an English pasture. A testament to inoffensive, folkie fun by a trio of lovely people, sporting lovely tunes.

A foul night on the beer could find a mid-morning salve from a listen to the 13 tracks that sit innocuously on this splendid reissue. Largely acoustic, this is what it sounded like in certain quarters of England during the late 60s and early 70s. Hell’s teeth! One wishes it was still the same – long hair, flutes, the occasional piano and a soft voice guiding you onto the jagged rocks, courtesy of the ethereal timbre Ann Steuart traded in.

In fact, Ann Steuart does all of the above, accompanied by the able hands of Lyndon Green and John Stannard on guitars, as well as a host of session artists (including Pentangle drummer, Terry Cox) tickling everything from the Bassoon to the occasional violin.

Pop all these seeds into a relatively fertile furrow and you’re sure to produce something as chipper as this. A joyous slice of unbridled innocence, carefully calculated to cause absolutely no offence to anybody alive, once alive, or yet to live. Whimsy, gentle harmonies and the lightness of a sea breeze drifting inland from the Devonshire coastline, are what make Tudor Lodge what it is: a bracing 45 minutes worth of folkie serenity, unburdened by cynicism.

The closest the album comes to political comment (the cornerstone upon which the majority of folk sounds have evolved) is ‘I See a Man’, regarding the poverty and plight of an old soldier, but what Tudor Lodge lacks in teeth it makes up for in melody. The undoubted highlight is the single ‘The Lady’s Changing Home’ (the B-side of which, ‘The Good Times We Had’, is included as a bonus track), with a bridge that shares more than a little in common with Bobby Bland’s ‘Ain’t No Love in the Heart of the City’, recorded three years later.

Also worthy of note are the instrumental and decidedly medieval hues of ‘Madeline’ and a spirited cover of Ralph McTell’s ‘Kew Gardens’.

All in all, music suited to a summer’s meadow and the perfect soundtrack to start the HFoS summer holidays. See you in September.

Originally released on the Vertigo label, Tudor Lodge is reissued by Esoteric and available to buy from Amazon.co.uk

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However, nothing could be further from the truth, as this is a strictly singer/songwriter affair, more in tune with Mr. Cat (Stevens) than Mr. Fox.

Released in 1970, Wil Malone sank without trace, but such is the profile that its creator has gone on to enjoy as both an arranger and composer, original pressings now exchange hands for in excess of £2000. That’s 2000 of the Queen’s very own pounds. Imagine that.

Obviously, those of the more money than sense persuasion are paying for the kudos associated with owning such a rare artefact, just as a private collector might pay billions for a stolen Mona Lisa, because, truth be told, if you’d just weighed in with a couple of grand for listening pleasure alone, you may be more than a little disappointed.

That’s not to say it’s complete rubbish, just a little dull and certainly nor worth breaking the bank for.

Despite many commentators describing Wil Malone as being popsike, I could find nothing psychedelic about the album at all, even by the standards of some lighter than air psychedelic pop offerings.

Okay, some of the lyrics are dreamily out there, for instance on ‘February Face’ or the paean to lost childhood ‘Down Maundies’, but as stated at the start of this review; Wil Malone remains in very much a Cat Stevens/Dylan-esque vein.

Vaguely of a folk bent, Wilson Malone does away with drums and bass for all but one of the tracks, the jarring ‘At the Silver Slipper’, instead relying simply on his guitar and his orchestral arrangements to carry the album. As in the case of the first two Roy Wood solo albums, he plays all the instruments himself, successfully creating the illusion of a chamber orchestra. This adds a baroque element to some of the tracks, although it remains a little low in the mix for my liking.

Nevertheless, it’s passable stuff. Not particularly suited to these ears, but worthy of a listen if this kind of thing is your bag.

The recent CD reissue by Morgan Music, features a second album entitled Until the End (The Long Lost Album?), and pulls together tracks recorded in 1970, possibly for an intended follow-up album. These are a little more dynamic than those on Wil Malone and largely piano lead. There are some fine melodies and the inclusion of a rhythm section throughout, which makes for a far livelier listen, even with the bible-thumping of opening track ‘Jesus’.

Wil Malone by Wilson Malone is reissued by Morgan and available to buy from Amazon.co.uk

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Strange Folk is a collection of folk songs, some from the 1960s and 1970s, and others more recent, which share a dark or decidedly unusual edge. The 19 tracks hereon range from the eerie, in Beth Gibbons & Rustin Man’s ‘Mysteries’, to the unintentionally terrifying with the Incredible String Band’s masterclass in cat-strangling, tuneless dirgemaking ‘Saturday Maybe’.

But don’t let the inclusion of those enemies of the carried note put you off – skip buttons could well have been invented with these forte-free fiends in mind – as Strange Folk manages to erase any bad Incredible String-based experiences with some shrewdly chosen musical remedies.

Magnet’s ‘Maypole’, the pagan fertility rite taken from 1973′s aforementioned The Wicker Man, is fittingly bizarre and, as anybody who’s seen the film will already know, its jauntiness belies a murky undercurrent. Of the other older stuff, Donovan’s ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’, with words provided by the W.B. Yeats poem of the same name, is a spectral treat, while Forest’s ‘Fading Light’ and Tyrannosaurus Rex’s ‘Great Horse’ also stand out.

From the crop of newer material, the opener ‘Mysteries’, Eighteenth Day of May’s floral ‘The Highest Tree’, and Vashti Bunyan’s haunting ‘Here Before’ take pride of place in the winner’s enclosure. Only Joanna Newsom’s ‘Clam, Crab, Cockle, Cowrie’ lets the modern intake down, approaching ISB levels of earache inducement with its paint-stripper caterwauling.

Undoubtedly the highlight of Strange Folk is Pentangle’s 1969 tale of devilish betrayal, ‘House Carpenter‘, resplendent in all its sitar-laced, psychedelic finery.

If the ethereal delights of the darker reaches of folk, and the many forms it manifests, are your particular bag, then you could do a lot worse than seeking out a copy of this particular collection.

Strange Folk is released on Albion Records and available to buy from Amazon.co.uk

Also in Compilation Week:

Looking Towards the Sky – Progressive, Psychedelic and Folk Rock from the Ember Vaults

Cave of Clear Light – The Pye and Dawn Records Underground Trip 1967-1975

Spirit of Joy – Tales From the Polydor Underground 1967-1974

Real Life Permanent Dreams – A cornucopia of British psychedelia 1965-1970

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