double mustachio, por favor

really nice album here from what looks to be a pair of stylish mustachio seeker dudes of new jersey backstreets. they stir the pot with ethereal folk, good timey rousers, vibing fuzz emerging in the right places. this one is a total keeper. been described as like "an american Van Morrison" or something. i can get down by that. my rip, but should you want one they pop up fairly frequently...

HEY LEAVE SOME COMMENTS!!! i know how many of you are out there.... ;-)

luv, CG

my hero

malvina reynolds was a very special lady. she sang pretty much straight from her heart about topical concerns in a way that was accessible and beautiful to everyone from children to grandparents. to call her a protest singer is false (though i'm sure some would insist she is), but perhaps i say this because usually i hate protest singers (but somehow this has become a personal fave). malvina takes you in her arms (i would describe this music in terms of hugs and warmth) and shows you a kind of love and care the world is missing, and then you say "ah!" this is what we must do... i mean its just so much different than being barked at by some guy with his fish fry propaganda. she touches on all kinds of social concerns on this record, without sounding preachy or overbearing. she uses small allegories and simple stories like woody guthrie to let you uncover the point she is trying to make. some of these songs are purely unique. take the song that starts off the album, "the new restaurant" - the birth of the health food movement! she loved the verve and style of a flashy new diner, but the food "was terrible..." in her wispy and magical voice this takes on a lovely dynamic that you have to hear. another favorite is "Little Boxes" which addresses urban sprawl and the shittiness of the suburbs in a way that a 3 year old could understand! i love this stuff. your lips curl up in a smile but at the same time your eyes water a bit. she takes on the klu klux klan, rolls the over-verboseness and hyper-cleanliness of modern society into clever metaphors, and professes love for the universe. maybe one of the most moving songs is "bitter rain" a lamentation of the over arching sorrow of human existence on this planet. it takes me there... she sings like she is on her deathbed. her ouevre is a must. try it on for size.

p.s. album is '67 lp SINGS THE TRUTH

sweet sweet abandon

i should hope that in jesus' final moments in the earthly plane he hallucinated this incredible scene: a young tone deaf woman whose love of god is so strong that only hillbilly barroom shuffle music can barely approach the strength of her great passion for his lordship... he watched this minor angel tearing away at an electric guitar in a tin shack in missouri (america of all places!) from his perch on the cross and knew that all his work was worth clearly something if he could inspire such unprecedented devotion in such a blissfully unaware child. Sing, sing my cherub! let no limits of tone or harmony hamper your glorious vision of my deity!!! into the light my dear, the LIGHT!!! and such was the making of Isabel Baker's timeless masterpiece in XIAN dementia, I LIKE GOD'S STYLE. there's almost nothing like it. purely and concretely OUT in its lack of all concern for musicality or vocal delivery making this one of the great triumphs of purely unhinged music. do not miss, ye heathen blog hoppers!

neon warriors!

today i must be brief ... but in honor of the entire musical spectrum, i give ya something LOUD ... has been angels farting fer some time in my dome. white boy wasn't average. neither was his band of ratsies..... neither were they SOFT. this shit CRANKS. straight up psych-punk-metal SHRED. so fer all ya'll who wasnt so fond of the christ kingdoms or the rural free mail delivery records or depressed poet soliloquoys i give this one to you. may god SPEED!

p.s. this comes from BALTIMORE!!!
p.s.s. thankyou auto!
p.s.s.s. somebody should reissue this!
p.s.s.s.s. early 80's on tradewind records
p.s.s.s.s.s. luv ya'll
p.s.s.s.s.s.s. cary
p.s.s.s.s.s.s.s. LINK IS FIXED = DOWNLOAD NOW

more pillow sounds for dreamz or nightmarez...

i present you fine folks a stone cold MONSTER poetry psych whatsis, that took a bit of time to creep up and DESTROY my mental capacities, but when it did it was rather like those dreams you awake after and continue to reel from them throughout your day. like an angel visiting you in yr slumber and placing divinity's stamp on yr cerebrum for several hours into the waking state. it is a magical sensation. gene steiker and larry s. chengges both achieved this sonically, but also managed to capture this sincere vibration on wax. a feat i doubt has happened twice. it is pure dreamworld, this record. barely there, but totally formed. sadder than christ but ecstatic like the sun. this is a straight shot to the other side of something. and other fans have remarked that the linchpin cut, LOVE OUT OF A CRUMBLING FORGE could garner puddles more money than the lp usually goes for. the fact is, that cut may be the only one that truly appeals to your usual acid head psych traveller, but that cut needs the rest of the lp for the whole picture to fully burn and dissolve, exfoliation and symmetry matching in the twilight house on the cover. this is a rip from my copy. i hope this means as much to you, in time, as it certainly does to me.

"often it is not so easy to put into words what one feels. the syllables fall short and measure the wildness unbound in the heart"

what does R.F.D. stand for?

and here's part two of our dream time xian folk whisperings series which will conclude today. i'm not sure any of the psych heavies out there have determined this band's origin, and maybe that's appropriate cause the sounds are so floating and free of worry its hard to imagine them belonging to the ears of a hungry coffee house audience or some stodgy church group. the fact that it's jesus music doesn't make a big difference here... on a certain level psychedelic wordplay is sufficiently similar to liturgy and these can enmesh and intertwine quite successfully if a band doesn't feel the need to throw fire and brimstone. sounding very local, very white, and purely at ease, this LP is a total charm for hometown-soundz-doing-the-christ-thing-bag. hopefully they can take you home too.....

here's a group shot courtesy of will at showandtellmusic.com who graciously photographed the backside of this album fer internet posterity. so classic...


p.s. thanks to timsky for these sounds!

in heaven everything is fine...

totally killer LP by mister Dennis Ryder, xian folkie extraordinaire, called "Let Me Take You to the Kingdom" ... top of the heap in this dimension. i think i might like it even more than the genre's sacred cow Perry Leopold. Dennis is a smooth rider, to be sure, its music that sneaks up in its effortlessness and seemingly perfect tranquility. the songs are tight and well written and a few are even quite POP gem worthy. its a SPIRITUAL record too... not blind propaganda. beauty in faith can be a wonderful thing when its not pretentious. the acid archives reccomend combining this one with R.F.D.'s early 70s effort "Take Me Home" which works with similar clay and seems to have its compass pointed in the same direction as our friend Dennis here, so letting this golden halo rise above yer domes, i will post the R.F.D. manana to round out your super soft xian collection. cheers, CG

whatcha gonna do?

denny doherty passed yesterday, and i wanted to honor him by sharing his great 70s solo album. its only available as an import cd from japan, so i figure im not gonna cut into some huge amount of royalties or nuthin. the cut that tears my head apart: TUESDAY MORNING. mandolin trembles gently group vocals come in, vibes arrive in style, rain and thunder drop from above, and the time just passes by....... a steam train goes on down the line, and before you know it the accordion player chimes in too. church organ gives heed to sunday's arrival, and before you know it MONDAY MONDAY is running though your head, but slowed a bit and now with groovin' piano and that mandolin just making the whole scene so bittersweet. the week is done, and we love you denny! RIP

marconi notaro

gorgeous lp here for you today. inimitable, No Sub Reino Dos Metazoarios by Marconi Notaro, c. 1973. deep and heavy jungle raga Brasilian psych trip, that destroys me from start to finish. i really don't need to say much about this one. there's few like it, and the ones that are often described in a similar way have never done it for me like this one does. just listen...

stargazer

i posted a shitty rip of this a few months ago and it has taken me that long to get this one done right. in the interim i've probably played the thing 20 times and have grown to love it with all my heart. warning: i doubt it will appeal to half of you. unless prog-disco fantasy-concept all keyboard bands from LA are your thing...

i don't know what exactly gets me so good with this, but for a start the production is really well done, and Colleen Fitzpatrick's vocals are gorgeous. then you add in the fact that they take a disco-y song and let it expand out into prog realms with some longer cuts that get all kind of textures going in your head. this one was included in the Acid Archives, and at first i found that a bit hard to understand, but alas it was Aaron Milenski's write-up that had me feeling compulsively in need to hear this. and after the songs have been well embedded into my brain so that even i can sing along, i realize what fully realized head soundz these truly are. a special beast, this one, hitting all kinds of 70s realms i hadn't even dreamed of yet. not to be missed if you enjoy something a little different once and a while....

re-wind: christian yoga church

ok, alot of people have asked for this, so i thought i'd give it another chance in the name of himalayan diplomacy, but the coin lands in the same place as it did several months ago. today's rainy january saturday morning seemed appropriate for this lp to work its high mountain spiritual charmz, and alas i seemed to slip into snooze again with this one. bollocks, bollocks, bollocks. i like track 4... i feel like they get something here vaguely approaching the greatness of other acid tripping twilight zoners like germany's DOM. if you've heard the yarn about this one before, and if you requested it, i'm sure you have, it goes something like this.... weird eastern-xian crossroads church followers are soaring on blotter out in the nevada desert making raw noise at the gates of dawn. YAWN. its such a classic acid archives sell ya quick tagline (don't get me wrong, i love these) but it belies the fact that the MUSIC just isnt that compelling. i could point you to a number of ethnic recordings that are a hundred times more musically visceral, and actually seemingly lysergic and trancey than this. but ya know this one has got this super groovy cover, and an intriguing back story, so plz fork 300 for the OG vinyl, senor.

up on the mountain you don't need your little blue pills...

here's one for the nascent days of the new year... some may have heard of this one in the years gone way past, but its fairly hard to come by, even on disco compacto, amazon charts a used copy going for a whopping 47 bucks! and thus hoyt axton deserves some new ears. My Griffin is Gone came out in '69 from the hands of a relatively straight country/folk guy who's voice is a bit like fred neil, and takes things into cosmic ambitions/lofty thought territory for better and worse. the allmusic review by eugene chadbourne is quite dead-on, so i'll paraphrase a little bit: "He settles into some remarkable moods on the best parts of the album, communicating with such a sense of the natural that it makes the work of many other recording artists seem stilted. He can evoke the feeling of Colorado simply by mentioning the state as if in passing conversation; other singers would have to be recorded riding up and down a ski lift strumming in order to establish any equivalent sense of time and place." the best tracks are a nice addition to any 60s fanatic's librarium... all over it could use alittle more bite, but on the best tracks like, "It's All Right Now" a true personality resonates through the sonic ambience and the singer's strongly summoned vocals. timely relevance for sleepy nostalgia and new years fog... check 'er out, ye might like.