ERPSONGS

This band was founded by band leader Ed Wynne, who with his brother Roly Wynne met the other band members of the first line-up of OZRIC TENTACLES at a campfire during the Stonehenge Free Festival in 1983. The band immediately hit it off and performed a jam session on the spot. The members took the hippie vibe of the Grateful Dead and married it with the space rock of Hawkwind and Steve Hillage era Gong and added other influences such as the electronic music of the day. Two years later after becoming a huge hit playing live gigs, the demand for their music meant they needed to have their music available for the hungry fans. Unfortunately by this time a decade after the space rock sound reached its pinnacle, no record label was willing to take on this type of music, thus OZRIC TENTACLES took matters into their own hands and produced their own music and distributed six of their first albums on cassettes only. ERPSONGS is the first of these albums and shows how the band had a clear vision of what they wanted to sound like from the beginning.

As a fan of the 90s albums, it is very interesting to go back and check out these earlier ones. This debut album has that organic homemade feel to it and offers upbeat guitar riffs with spaced out trippy synths and a nice groovy bass. There is dub and lots of sound effects and is actually pretty impressive for a do-it-yourself project in the early 80s. I find this a decent listen but at this stage the band's more progressive tendencies hadn't quite blossomed yet. Their sound is very much in its infancy and it lacks the strange time signature and heaps of extra instruments that they would become famous for. The psytrtrance and ambient features are here but not as sophisticated as the albums beginning with their first fully developed album "Pungent Effulgent." However, despite not being the most intricate or developed of their releases, this is a fun little album that has a nice feel to it. ERPSONGS and the other five cassette-only albums have been released on CD and remastered and can all be found together in the recently re-issued box set "Vitamin Enhanced." 3.5 rounded down