84. The Beau Brummels - Triangle (July 1967)

1. Are You Happy

2. Only Dreaming Now

3. Painter of Women*

4. The Keeper of Time

5. It Won't Get Better

6. Nine Pound Hammer

7. Magic Hollow*

8. And I've Seen Her

9. Triangle

10. The Wolf of Velvet Fortune*

11. Old Kentucky Home

A-

Well this was a nice little left turn of an album. Most of the psychedelia we've had so far has been of the atonal, "freak out" sort. Triangle, on the other hand, is a delicate collection of country-tinged psych pop, complete with string arrangements and piano and harpsichord flourishes. The Beau Brummels were a pop band, and they bring a pop sensibility to their music. No long, noodling fuzz guitar solos. No twenty minute songs about acid. No "Help, I'm a Rock". Just lovely, catchy songs with vaguely fantasy-inspired lyrics, all impeccably arranged and played. Topping it all off is Sal Valentino's voice, which sounds sort of like Bob Dylan if Bob Dylan could actually sing, and which forms a great contrast with the lushness of the music. Honestly, it's enough to make me wish I still smoked pot.

Lyrically, the album is mostly one of strong images and sustained moods. "Painter of Women" is about a blind painter of eyeless women. "The Keeper of Time" is about an old man who's the keeper of time. "Magic Hollow", a very pretty song, invites you to visit a magic hollow of some sort (it might be a euphemism). And "The Wolf of Velvet Fortune" is about... Well, honestly I don't know. But it sure is pretty and dark and mysterious. The title track is nice because, unlike a lot of "all you need is love" nonsense, it posits a three way balance in life of rain, sunshine and love. That acknowledgement of the darker aspects of reality underpins a lot of this album, if only in the slightly queasy lyrics and the shadowy arrangements, and it's a welcome viewpoint to encounter. The Beau Brummels were clearly, at this point, the thinking man's psychedelic popsters. "Triangle" also features an incredibly catchy coda which consists of Valentino stretching the song title out to about eight syllables, and I guarantee that once you hear it it'll be stuck in your head for days.

Rounding out the more abstract numbers are a couple of more-or-less straight country songs - "Nine Pound Hammer" and the satirical "Old Kentucky Home", originally a Randy Newman song called "Turpentine & Dandelion Wine", later a hit for Johnny Cash.

Is this album going to blow your mind? Probably not. But it is an incredibly well-executed album, and if you're the sort of person like me whose idea of psychedelia involves a lot of lush strings and out-there imagery than I imagine you'll find it pretty rewarding. Certainly it's more engaging than a bunch of twenty minute guitar solos.

83. Love - Da Capo (November 1966)

1. Stephanie Knows Who

2. Orange Skies*

3. ¡Que Vida!

4. 7 and 7 Is*

5. The Castle

6. She Comes in Colours*

7. Revelation

B

Now hang on a minute. According to Wikipedia this was released in 1966. Is the Book only using UK release dates? I don't know. At any rate, this is where it is. So lets deal with it.

One interesting thing about doing this project is that it's forcing me to examine my own relationship with music, and where my preferences actually lie. And one thing I've discovered is that I tend to prefer more direct, easily comprehensible lyrics which tell a story or sketch a character or contain strong imagery. Not that I can't enjoy more impressionistic stuff - I just no longer feel much of a desire to puzzle out the intricacies of obscure lyrics, and I'm too much of a stick in the mud to engage in elaborate flights of fancy. Which is a long way of saying that this album left me cold. Arthur Lee's lyrics are esoteric to say the least, and not always in a good way. What does "When I was invisible I needed no light, but now you see through me, am I out of sight" even mean? And what about the opening lines to "7 and 7 Is"? "When I was a boy, I thought about the times I'd be a man - I'd sit inside a bottle and pretend that I was in a can. In my lonely room, I'd sit my mind in an ice cream cone. You can throw me if you wanna, 'cause I'm a bone and I go oop-bip-bip, oop-bip-bip, yeah!"

Sure, Arthur Lee. Whatever you say. It's telling that Love's best song ("Alone Again Or"), was written by Bryan MacLean, who also wrote the lovely "Orange Skies". Then again, maybe these lyrics were an attempt to capture a fractured psyche? If so, I hope someone gave Arthur Lee a hug.

In any case these lyrical excesses are a pity, because the music on the first half of this album is pretty impressive. There hasn't really been anything like it before on the list. There are jazz influences, in the use of flutes and saxophone, and odd time changes, but everything flows neatly from one idea to the next, without the deliberately jarring juxtapositions of prog. This is a folk rock album, but only in the loosest sense that there's a lot of accoustic guitar and intelligent (if barely intelligible) lyrics. It's really quite hard to categorize. "Stephanie Knows Who" lurches from heavy rock to jazzy folk and wanders through several time changes. "Orange Skies" is pretty folk pop. "¡Que Vida!" is a melancholy latin-tinged number that features the sort of gentle flute accents one associates with a bossa nova recording. And "7 and 7 Is" is a complete monster - a track anchored by a driving drum beat so complicated it took countless takes to nail, and with heavy guitars and a forceful vocal, all climaxing in a literal explosion. It really sounds like nothing else from the time, and in some ways it's kind of like post-punk ten years before that was even a thing. 

Unfortunately, while the first half of the album is pretty good, and certainly very experimental in an engaging and accessible way, side two consists of a single interminable jam. "Revelations" is just terrible, and I'm not even sure what it's doing here. The band would have been better served just releasing the songs on side one as an EP.

Poking around on the internet, a lot of people seem to rate side A of this album as possibly Love's best work. I don't personally see how anyone who's heard Forever Changes could think that, but then what do I know. This is a strange jumble of an album, lurching from song to song with little internal logic, and while it's very beautiful musically the lyrics veer from wide-eyed optimism to incomprehensible druggy paranoia and back again with such abandon that its jarring. Still, this was obviously an important album in the development of experimental pop. I don't personally buy into the notion that Love could have been huge with the right promotion - I think their music was too weird and idiosyncratic to ever find more than a cult audience. But Da Capo is a good listen. I just rated it a "B" because "Revelations" singlehandedly dragged the grade down from an A-.

82. Moby Grape - Moby Grape (June 1967)

 

1. Hey Grandma

2. Mr. Blues

3. Fall on You

4. 8:05

5. Come in the Morning

6. Omaha*

7. Naked, If I Want To

8. Someday*

9. Ain't No Use

10. Sitting by the Window*

11. Changes

12. Lazy Me

13. Indifference

A-

I think it's obligatory to open any discussion of Moby Grape by observing how unlucky they were, and that if it weren't for that infamous run of bad luck they might have been huge. That said, the band's status as might-have-beens kind of overshadows their music, and it would be easy to heap undue praise on their debut album purely out of a desire to correct the course of history.

Having said which, this is a pretty great album. Although it's clearly psychedelic rock, the songs have an economy to them - they're all short and sweet, and there are no acid jams to be found. Instead the songs (and by extension the album) rush by so quickly that you barely have time to process one before its over and the next one's started. This helps to keep the album sounding fresh all the way through, especially as there's a decent amount of variety in the tracks. The rockier numbers like "Hey Grandma" and "Omaha" seem to get the most attention, being obvious precursors to the power pop and the like of the 1970s, but my personal favourites are the slower numbers "Someday" (which begins with gorgeous harmonies that would pop up again in a Galaxie 500 song, though I can't recall which), and the haunting "Sitting by the Window", which is a lovely song about lost love. There are even a couple of stomping soul numbers ("Mr. Blues" and "Changes") which, while probably the weakest songs on the album, are still pretty good.

That said, the short and sweet approach works well on this album, but there are a few tracks that should have been longer. "Omaha" is one of catchiest, most rocking songs we've had so far, but it really deserves to be longer and keep building, and fades out just when it's getting good. I think I read somewhere that Moby Grape's manager insisted they restrict themselves to a three minute pop formula to ensure lots of singles, and it's a bit of a mixed blessing. 

This is, really, a very good album. For one thing, it's very well played. There's some great guitar interplay and the rhythm section is incredibly snappy and quite well-recorded. The group also sings in harmony a lot, and it's beautiful. Not only do all the members have great voices, but the production on the album captures them perfectly. (It was kind of weird, actually - due to the position of the stereo speakers, and where I was sitting as I listened to this, the harmonies on several songs echoed off my loungeroom wall, and I ended-up listening to the album in surround sound). Lyrically, the album also holds-up quite well. All the members of the group contributed songs, and while no-one is going to mistake them for Nobel laureates they deliver touching, no-nonsense songs about everything from the generation gap to unemployment to lost love to whatever "Omaha" was about (apparently not Omaha, Nebraska, oddly enough). 

It's unfortunate, really. There's no way that Moby Grape could ever live up to the hype surrounding them at the time, and this album's reputation as a one-off classic means it's pretty impossibly for it to live up to the hype which has since amassed around it. But that doesn't mean it isn't a great collection of brilliantly played tunes, at turns witty, rocking, and poignant. 

81. Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band - Safe as Milk (June 1967)

1. Sure 'Nuff 'n Yes I Do

2. Zig Zag Wanderer*

3. Call on Me

4. Dropout Boogie*

5. I'm Glad

6. Electricity*

7. Yellow Brick Road

8. Abba Zabba

9. Plastic Factory

10. Where There's Women

11. Grown So Ugly

12. Autumn's Child

B+

Even if you're only familiar with Captain Beefheart at second or third hand, it shouldn't surprise you to know that this album is rambling, strange, eclectic, and faintly annoying. But before I listened to Safe as Milk, I'd only ever heard Trout Mask Replica, and so I was surprised at how listenable this album is. All the Beefheart hallmarks are there - odd time changes, songs that seem like their stitched together from three completely different works of music, vocals that sound like Howlin' Wolf being electrocuted to death while reading from his dream journal, and so on - but the album is firmly rooted in a sort of bluesy take on modern (for the time) rock and R&B, and so things only occasionally get out of hand. 

Really, the idea to marry Chicago and Delta blues of the rawest sort to modern pop rock production shouldn't really work, and to be fair it doesn't always. But this is a relentlessly inventive album, and I can't help but admire its ambition even if I don't feel much of a desire to listen to it again. Oddly enough, this was Beefheart's stab at mainstream success, and he was disappointed at the complete lack of impact it made on the charts. Maybe in 1967 his ambition might have made sense, but I doubt anyone listening to this record today can take seriously the idea of a bunch of kids rushing out to buy something like "Abba Zabba" or "Dropout Boogie".

This is obviously a pretty influential album, though. Tom Waits has admitted that he owes a significant debt to Beefheart, and it's clear that his vocal style on his more unhinged tracks is directly inspired by Beefheart's manic growl. Another obvious acolyte is PJ Harvey, whose early work, all atonal and full of freewheeling guitars, is partly inspired by Beefheart; and who opened her 1995 magnum opus To Bring You My Love with the words "I was born in the desert", which are also the first words on Safe as Milk. (She also seems to have copped the rhythm from "Dropout Boogie" for "I Think I'm a Mother"). 

But really, I don't much care for this album. Mostly, I think, it's the production. The version I listened to on Spotify sounds like it was recorded through a carboard box, and the arrangements are so busy and overdriven that it became overwhelming after a while. I also found that Beefheart's vocal was frequently buried in the mix, and half the time I had no idea what he was saying (as opposed to the other half, when I simply didn't understand the words coming out of his mouth). I can see why a lot of people would like this, but I don't have much time for it. It must have been pretty amazing when it came out but time has dulled its impact, and in any case I don't have a huge fondness for 60s hard rock. Which is odd because I actually quite like the much more difficult Trout Mask Replica.

I guess, in the end, I admire this album, and I admire Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band, but I think his music was in some ways more important for the possibilities it opened up than as something anyone would want to listen to. The songs on this album are unusual and challenging and fun, but not the kind of fun I'm very interested in having.