ARBORESCENCE

I'm not going to be one of those guys who says, "You have one Ozric album, you have them all..." Okay, I did say it :-), but let me say that if you need to pick up an Ozric album this one would be a great choice. It starts off with a super-rocking jam, "Astro Cortex" is straight out of Hawkwind territory, a great song to blast from your car speakers. "Yor-Bar- Og" and "Arborescence" tone things down but are still groovy. Then we get into world music land with the following two songs leading up to my favorite song, "Myriapod". This song just rips! One of my favorite things about the Oz's is when they change gears in the middle of a song and speed things up, blasting into the stratosphere and this song does that in spades, AWESOME! "There's a Planet Here" slows things down and "Shima Koto" levels the album out mellow-like but jamming. So, what you have here is what you'll pretty much get from this album onward, a little of this and a little of that. A fine album to listen to loud. 3.5 star rating bumped to 4 for good measure.