MAGICK BROTHER

The debut of a bizarre planet. Well, it didn't met my expectations -- it's nothing short of good, but certainly not as stellar as GONG trilogy will be. This is a shape of GONG to come, so to say. This hyper-dipper-ultra psychedelic music - Syd Barrett's influences are obvious. There are also a lot of tape manipulations, which is fine, but there lays the problem: there' are only a few conventional songs, the rest of the album are noodling. Which doesn't have to be bad, but in this case songs=ideas. There are melodies, passages, timbres, even lyrics that will be fully developed later. However, apart from three excellent tunes (one acid electric, one acoustic and one reggae) the rest is suffering from 'the debut syndrome': young people unable to construct the whole picture. But the pieces are fine too.

Production is even below 1969 standards, but I think these guys just didn't care for that. It's evident they were experimenting with different timbres, including heavy distortion, not only on guitar, but on the whole tape mixdown - that's why it's hissy at the moments. Moreover, amounts of phaser/flanger and similar swooshing effects is hilarious. But I like it.

This record will help you understand better the origins of GONG family - from the very Canterbury beginnings (it's the only GONG record that shows the hints of Canterbury sound IMHO) to the reggae approach in 1990's.