109. The Incredible String Band - The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter (March 1968)

1. Kooeeoaddi There*

2. The Minotaur's Song*

3. Witch's Hat

4. A Very Cellular Song*

5. Mercy I Cry City

6. Waltz of the New Moon

7. The Water Song

8. Three Is a Green Crown

9. Swift As the Wind

10. Nightfall

A

I can't help but imagine this album being rather polarising. Either you'll think it's a genius work of psychedelic folk and world music, or that it's a formless bundle of noise. I tend towards the former view, although even though I love side one of this album, I admit that by the time the album as a whole is finished I've definitely had enough.

It's kind of impossible to describe the sound of The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter (incidentally - what a great title). The really clever thing about it is that the Incredible String Band manage to draw from so many different styles of music, find the commonalities between them, and work their vast range of influences into a cohesive whole. So, in the course of one song, you'll hear snatches of Celtic folk, Mediaeval balladry, nursery rhymes, Indian classical, North African singing, rock music, and Bob Dylan. "The Minotaur's Song" is a musical hall number in which the titular beast lives in a labyrinth under the sea and grinds bones for his porridge, complete with call and response vocals. "Kooeeoaddi There" is a beautiful, wandering evocation of childhood. "A Very Cellular Song" mixes Caribbean spirituals, baroque harpsichords and Middle Eastern-style vocals to tell a complex epic about faith that at one point detours into a segment sung from the perspective of an amoeba.

Suffice it to say that this album is the last word in hippie nonsense. But it's the kind of hippie nonsense I like, with wide-eyed spiritualism and loose, strange music and a quintessentially British obsession with surreal fantasy, childhood, and nonsense verse. Eastern Mysticism 101 by way of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll. And musically, it really is great. Mike Heron and Robin Williamson aren't really the world's greatest singers or musicians, but they make up in versatility what they lack in skill. Their slightly rough approach also gives the album an earthy, mysterious and, for lack of a better word, "real" quality that conjures up (for me, anyway) memories of childhoods spent wandering through rainy paddocks, exploring the properties on which my grandparents lived. I think a large part of my weakness for this sort of thing comes from 1) having an English mother, and by extension spending a lot of time around my English grandparents with their comical Mancunian accents, and 2) spending a lot of my childhood living in the country, where we were forced to go play outside, and dividing my time between doing as such and reading a lot of fantasy novels. Throw in a small but consistent interest in philosophy and Eastern spiritualism, and I'm very much this album's target audience.

I would suggest, I suppose, that if you're unsure about this album you just listen to "A Very Cellular Song". It's a world in miniature, really quite beautiful, and as the strangest song on the album probably a good indicator for whether you'll like the album as a whole. I personally really enjoyed the whole thing, and will probably seek out more of the Incredible String Band's music.