The Psych Rock Lounge

Squabbles aside, one important thing I hope we all agree on: it is a masterwork of MELODIC composition. Two/three tracks here that I'm CERTAIN a fair lot of us would be desirous of having composed ourselves.


It is always strange to me that you have group masterpieces like this , but when the artists go solo they just go ordinary at once. Has anyone anything good to say of Hayward's solo lps - or, say, Art Garfunkel's?
They are just women's-pap records, far, far from the earlier heights.

Peak Hour is psychedelic.
Its psychedelic in a sorta beat Go Too sorta...erm sorta way.




(Damn, I'm playing devil's advocate again.)

Kayleur wrote: Yeah, you are correct. Days Of Future Passed is one long acid freak-out.

Once again, you missed the point of the post. DOFP was the "come down" album at the end of an acid party, not an acid freak-out itself. That honor would go to other albums like the following.

Speaking of dark-trip music,
is it not rather curious that in any forum discussion of psych you cannot let it go without bringing-up, BRAINTICKET "COTTONWOODHILL" lp?

Even more curious that - dammit! - this is not coming out of US (or even UK), but Switzerland (or was it Austria? - I forget. Welll...Van Droogenbrogen-wotsit was Belgian. THAT I do know.)

Yes, it is a '72 release, so, PLEASE I do not want to be arguing minutea like this can't be cornerstone psych. That is granted, okay?

"Only listen once a day to this record. Your brain might be destroyed! Hallelujah Records takes no responsibility." So goes the parental warning stuck on the back of the orig lp.

It starts with two, rather lame tracks (compared to the onslaught that is coming on the remainder (one and a half sides) of the lp.
Then it starts: the interminable 25 minutes of repeated Hammond mind-bore, the total female voice freakout.


We all know this legendary record (well, let us say collectors of Mars Volta probably do not).
I want however to take this oportunity to do a mini-review on their cd, just out, "Future, Past and Present" (I hope I got that title correct.)

Its been 15 years since their last release "Alchemic Universe". So this was a MOST- AVIDLY awaited release.
Gone are all the Tangerine Dream moves of "Alchemic" and "Adventure". But - we all want to know - is gone the sheer Madness of "Cottonwoodhill".
Well...yes.
But, compositionally, it is a definite return.

Just like history is but a chronicle of reiteration, all music is derived from previous musics. Evolution involves a lot of repetition. Nothing is inovative.Its just bands in the grip of their delusion, beleiving they are not derivative.

"Past,Present,Future" is deffo derivative of the fiorst release. "Dancing On the Volcano arts One and two" comprise over 30 minutes of the 75 minute cd. And, yes, its all basically repeated line - only this time round its not Hammond.
Where it differs from the psychedelica of the first lp, is that its now more prog-fusiony. Very well done, mind. Like the recent Gong lp, the band leader evidently took great care in bringing in top musicians.

On the minus side, the cd has much female narration.
This gets to be too much as we move towards the last two tracks of the cd. One is a long spoken (over music, of course) ramble on a story from Egyptian mythology. The last track is - curiously enough - blues-based and has the woman repeating the same line OVER AND OVER: "What have we done...What have we done?"

Overall, I recommend you all this cd.
But dont accept as dark a trip as The Legend.

I prefer Strange Days to The Doors debut, but as I am a stoner from the 70s, the really great psychedelic rendition is the compilation Weird Scenes Inside the Gold Mine (released 1972), which is so much better than your average overplayed greatest hits package; in fact, it contains most of the trippy Doors songs and has only a few actual hits.

If you like psychedelic doom metal in the vein of Sleep, Ufomammut, Yob and their ilk you owe yourself to listen to Elder. They started out as not far off from basically a Sleep clone, but have now developed their own style very quickly.

Someone brought up Echo and Bunnymen as being PSYCHEDELIC?

I must of missed that.


May God frustrate that poster forever.

Go ahead, a****le.

Destroy it for everyone else.

Toaster Mantis wrote: Speaking of the entire "what is psychedelic and what isn't?" debate, then someone posting The Doors, reminds me that I'm still not sure whether to count them as part of "psychedelic music". I mean, Jim Morrison was heavily into the use of hallucinogens, and musically they kind of came from the same place but in terms of their "ideology" or perhaps more broadly I don't categorize them within that cultural movement. I think psychedelia is defined as Greek for "expansion of the mind", and The Doors were always too much inwards-looking in their music being oriented towards Jim Morrison's personal demons and psychological neuroses. It's the same thing I discussed when The Velvet Underground and Echo & the Bunnymen were brought up. The Doors and to some extent The Velvet Underground I regard more as forerunners of the 1980s goth rock subculture, than really part of the psychedelic movement as such.

I can only reiterate that what constituted later sixties Psych Rock such as backwards guitars and cymbals, spacey songs and obvious drug lyrics is not what constituted earlier American Psych Rock as there simply was not enough Beatles, Donovan and the Count Five to go around, so not very Psych Rock sounding bands like the Doors fit in nicely. I'll recap an excellent  quote from wiki that clealy identifies the Doors as an early American Psych band, along with some other early American and British Psych bands:

Edited by SteveG - February 25 2015 at 09:56

^Thanks for the post Christi. As usual, I'm always thrilled to find new Psych music.