MATCHING MOLE

Oh dear....what a stinking carcass of a record this is to be sure. After the lightweight but delightful O Caroline kicks things off, it just degenerates thereafter into a rambling and incoherent noodle fest. Although Robert Wyatt is a musician I have the utmost regard for, his decision to squander part of 1971 with these lazy hippies is at best, dubious. You can rest assured that the majority of track times listed here correlate exactly to how long these 'songs' took to write. This is fusion/freeform improv wank taken to it's inevitable and dreary conclusion. Without any sort of underlying structure or form to hang your ideas onto, you end up spitting into the wind like Matching Mole do here. To be fair, the drummer tries hard to inject some sort of propulsive direction to the proceedings, but very often he abandons this under the unflinching incoherence all around him. Fuzz bass, fuzz organ, fuzz guitar, fuzz Rhodes and fuzz head(s) are the main ingredients in the appalling and badly recorded mix.

The Canterbury crowd has thrown up some unequivocal gems like National Health, Hatfield & the North, Kevin Ayers etc but this is just undisciplined and amateur tomfoolery that should never have seen the light of day. If the best thing about an album is the cover, you really don't have your problems to seek.

It is particularly ironic that charges of self indulgence, long windedness, and lack of respect for your audience are reserved primarily for the usual Prog suspects like ELP, Yes, Genesis et al and yet here we have, preserved in atrocious stereo, everything that has rendered the label 'progressive rock' a pejorative one.

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