It's party time people! Ed gets positively upbeat and groovy on this 1988 Smash hit! This is so swinging and yet so so fucking tight it's pop perfection innit. Absolute anthem.
*The fact that this didn't make the top 10 in Australia or even crack the top 40 kinda made me hate Australia back then...well the machinations of the mainstream music scene at least. How fucking clueless! This gave me an insight, at an impressionable age, into how the world works ie. not how it should! Then again if The Go-Betweens' Spring Rain didn't go straight to the top of the charts what did I expect? The goddamn LP When There's This Party came from Everybody's Got To only made it to number 42 (???).
It's Friday night kick out the funky jams time. Here's a dose of Funky rock Spanishish stylee. I could listen to flute accompanied by bass and drums all day long but this has even more with its expansive summer-y harmonies, that organ worming its way around and the fabulous push and pull of that riff-age. Oh my the crazy flute with that infectiously hypnotic beat including mucho cowbell...Nice.
Tim Davis - Baby Won't You Come Out Tonight (1972)
Somehow I've missed hearing this song my entire life until last night. How could this be? Why don't we all know it? Why wasn't it in all our parents collections? Or on the radio when we were small? Or on the golden oldies radio now?
Sweet 70s country soul at its finest.
Thank you Lord!
*Rock, rhythm & blues and yacht rock royalty here with Boz Scaggs on guitar, Steve Miller on organ and to top it off production duties by Glyn Johns. The entire LP Take Me As I Am (Without Silver Without Gold), I can say now say after seven listens, is terrific stuff.
KebneKaise IIis Swedish prog-folk-rock with great grooves, Nordic folk elements and no absurd prog wankery. Superficially not unlike the best ethnological krautrock but when you get in it's deeply psychedelic and steeped in the mystique of Swedish folklore yet also kinda jaunty at times. Kebnekaise II was released in 1973 on the legendary Swedish prog label Silence, home of Bo Hansson, Älgarnas Trädgård, Träd Gräs O Stenar, Anna Själv Tredje etc.
Horgalåten is apparently a traditional Swedish tune rearranged by Kebnekaise. Mesmerising haunted ancient melodies amongst the mantra rock with a toe-tapping beat. Nice.
Kebnekaise - Comanche Spring (1973)
Epic psych jam that closes the album. Sweet mary jane was surely invented for listening to this.
*Greatest back cover ever. All bands should be beautifully drawn up a tree.
If you've not ever heard this one look out. For fans of of avant-garde and acid-folk vocal histrionics à la Comus, Tim Buckley, Yoko, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Peter Hammill et al. at their most outré, I promise this will not disappoint. Aria is the opening song to Sorrenti's debut LP of the same name. It wouldn't surprise me if side 4 of Nick Cave's Ghosteen was influenced by this epic track as there are some uncanny vocal melody parallels.
A few years later Sorrenti strangely enough went on to represent Italy at Eurovision. I can vouch for the quality of the rest of this LP while others also rate the follow up, after that he begins to depart from this aesthetic mission statement.
Poli Styrene Jass Band - Draino In Your Veins (1975)
This was really something. What on earth was it? It's like a blueprint for something that nobody ever bothered to follow up on. I mean you can hear hints of Roxy Music and misc. prog but what is the rest? Psychedelic soul? This is the sort of amalgamation of non-overt influences that also informed Television, Pere Ubu etc. I really think Draino In Your Veins is a forgotten little psych-prog anomaly of a pop song that deserves to be heard.
Poli Styrene Jass Band - Circus Highlights (1975)
This is the flipside to Draino In Your Veins. It's that classic in-between scenes syndrome innit: Too late for 60s psych into prog, not quite fitting mid 70s art rock and way too early for neo-psychedelia of the 80s and 90s. Melodically reverse-reminiscent of early Mercury Rev. If this incarnation had carried on in the maverick vein of this 7 inch they might have become legendary like their contemporaries Pere Ubu and electric eels instead of just a footnote.
Styrene Money - Radial Arm Saws (1977)
Weird for weird's sake maybe but these guys were compelled to make such a record surely that counts for something. Is it a paean to naff novelty faux-psychedelic cash in singles of the late 60s?
Styrene Money - I Saw You (1979)
Sounding almost conventional here, even endearing but I guess not many punk groups had piano led singles. It's actually more psychedelic than anything. This is why genre categories are pointless sometimes. Did the genre people ever use psych-punk as a term for this kind of thing? I Saw You is psychedelic and punk.
Styrene Money - Everything Near Me (1979)
Another sort of likeable slice of music that is at the precise intersection of psychedelic and punk. I guess not unlike some stuff The Homosexuals did.
Styrene Money - Jaguar Ride (1979)
The first Styrenes thing I heard back in the day because it was on an 80s Cleveland compilation. This is supposed to be a cover of the electric eels tune but it barely even resembles that song. It strangely actually sounds closer to Pere Ubu. I wonder if they just played this by memory considering there were no actual recordings of the electric eels version available at the time.
Good bit of hard-punky pub-rock. Narcotic pop at its finest, this was a top 40 hit in Britain. As the guy in the comments said "I'm 52 and still suffering from the teenage depression"
Belgium's Blast are a fun noisey blast of proto: Proto-punk, proto-thrash, proto-Motorhead and proto whatever else. The vocalist keeps it in a pop song realm making it somewhat less harsh than those future genres turned out to be though. I think they did just this one 7" single. Pretty cool.
