TRIP

The earliest available album of an artist whose prolific nature may only be outweighed by one other featured on Prog Archives, Sébastien Gramond is certainly an inspired musician. Since coming out with 'Trip' in 1991, the man has since made scores of albums ranging across the spectrum. Released at the heart of a minor psychedelic revival in the early 90's, Gramond's album 'Trip' is an incredibly acid-tinged piece of lo-fi garage rock. While the music certainly gets the drugged-out vibe across however, 'Trip' feels too much like the work of a novice to provide a legitimately enjoyable experience, although the overtly psychedelic nature of the music makes for something of a guilty pleasure.

Even a couple of minutes into the album's 'epic' opener 'Lucky One', I am reminded of a young Steven Wilson's work with the then-infantile Porcupine Tree, with their debut album 'On The Sunday Of Life'. Indeed, the same playful, ethereal and unpolished feeling is here in droves. Repetitive organ licks, raw guitar riffage, muffled vocals and simple drumming are the key elements to the music here, and while none of the ingredients is done very well, they do come together to make for a convincing atmosphere and sound.

'Lucky One' may look promising with a track length that nearly tops the twenty minute mark, but don't be fooled; the so-called 'epic' unfortunately doesn't make good use of its time, instead revolving around one musical idea on the keyboards that almost builds into something interesting, but takes far too long to make anything pertinent of itself. Luckily, the rest of the songs are generally more concise, although they too have many half-baked elements about them. Chief among those would be the choruses of the shorter songs, which feel almost as if Gramond is trying to rush through them as quickly as possible, to get back to the drawn-out, spacey sound he seems to love doing. The vocals of Gramond are quite weak here as well, although their garbled and incoherent nature seems to fit in with the psychedelic theme the music showcases.

The flaws and somewhat cheap nature of 'Trip' aside, the album is surprisingly gratifying what could easily pass by as a home demo by today's standards. While this is no underground gem I have found here, it does show that Gramond has plenty of musical potential to do great things, and with over seventy albums I have yet to listen to by this artist, that is the best sign I could possibly hope for.

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