THE BEAT GOES ON

Vanilla Fudge's second album from 1968 may well be their best known for all the wrong reasons. A concept album that was the direct result of the psychedelic movement that exploded after the Beatles released the seminal Sgt. Pepper's album in 1967, it's a collection of faults. By stringing together snippets of songs "through the ages", VF tried to make their own avant garde psychedelic classic. While the song selection may have been inspired, the performances certainly were not. Particularly on a run of mid sixties Beatles covers, as who but the Fab Four could do justice to songs like "Day Tripper" and "I Feel Fine". The singers of VF, Mark Stein and Tim Bogart, are merely passable vocalists to begin with, and musically the songs are boring straight covers. It's only when the band turn on their own organ drenched and heavy bass and guitar sound on Beethoven's Fur Elise/Moonlight Sonata that real proggy musical fireworks erupt. But it's a case of too little too late, after the band takes one on a musical history lesson that is well known, basic and boring.

A tape collage of politician's speeches that's some kind of anti war statement does little to bring the album to any type of climatic close, but "Voices In Time - Neville Chamberlain, Winston Churchill, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy and others" is probably the most inspired idea on the album.

If Vanilla Fudge had focused solely on working their musical magic on only or mainly classical compositions, the result would have been a very good proto prog album in the vain of the Nice's Ars Longa Vita Brevis. I must say that the album does hold a strange fascination for me, like watching a highspeed car crash, but that's not art, is it? What's left is this failed experiment that shows off the worst excesses of the late sixties' psychedelic movement. No wonder it was short lived. 2 stars.

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