Clear Light album review

Clear Light’s one and only album, a self-titled spurt of fast-paced US psychedelic rock, takes few chances, electing to play safe along the well-trodden path lined by jangly guitars, flowery melodies and folkish harmonies. As a result it provides a pleasing, if unremarkable, window onto one of the many L.A. psych bands that sprang up and took a shot at the underground scene during the late sixties.

Favouring an almost bubble-gum blueprint for the most part, although successfully replicating a Love sound in others, Clear Light comes into its own on two particular tracks. The darkly industrial ‘Street Singer’ and the terrifically sinister ‘Mr. Blue’. Dismissing the flowery formula that the rest of Clear Light adheres to, these two songs are worth the admission price alone.

The former immerses the listener in dark imagery from the start, with its opening lines “My eyes are sewn open, Unable to close, And I’m stung by the breeze, That my memory blows …” setting the tone. Written by folk singer/songwriters Greg Copeland and Steve Noonan, who scored a minor hit for the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band with ‘Buy Me for the Rain’, Clear Light’s interpretation is a staccato nightmare of fuzzy, fog-horn like guitars and bursts of baroque melody, coupled with a relentlessly overbearing sense of menace.

‘Mr Blue’ is a particularly sinister episode of The Prisoner, set to a West Coast psychedelic soundtrack. Originally by folk singer Tom Paxton, Clear Light’s extended workout stretches to six and a half minutes of partly sung, partly spoken intimidation directed at the titular Mr. Blue by the disembodied voice of a Number 2 / Thought Police style official. More importantly, it’s rivetingly good stuff – a pitch-perfect example of psychedelic rock that needs to be heard by anybody who claims a love for this genre of music.

Elsewhere, ‘The Ballad of Freddie & Larry’ does the business with its carnival brand of jaunty psych and it’s these three songs that push Clear Light into the recommendation zone that the other, more formulaic, tracks would’ve excluded it from.

The various members of Clear Light moved onto other successes following this album, mixing and playing with the likes of The Doors; Todd Lungdren; Crosby, Stills and Nash; and in the cases of Ralph Schukett and Michael Ney, playing on the psychedelic classic that is ‘The Porpoise Song‘, by the The Monkees.

Clear Light is released by Collector’s Choice Music and available from Amazon.co.uk

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album reviews, psychedelic rock