The Deviants (1969)

Third and final release from The Deviants. Sometimes referred to as "The Deviants 3". Future punk bands owe quite a lot to these guys, seeing as how they're one of the very few bands to have existed in the late sixties who garner the appellation of proto-punk, and they did it quite well to say the least. Vocalist Mick Farren would go on to be one of the most respected rock critics of the twentieth century, while other members went on to form or join other brilliant bands: Pink Fairies, Hawkwind, and drummer Twink's solo ventures. Farren described The Deviants musical style as "teeth-grinding psychedelic rock" somewhere between The Stooges and Mothers of Invention. Regardless of how you choose to hear this album, it's a classic, and that cover art is downright creepy. Make sure to check out their first two offerings as well, Ptoof! and Disposable. I'd be happy to upload those if requested.

Deviants

Black Sun Ensemble - Lambent Flame (1989)

Post-Kashmir Led Zeppelin but pre-21st century sun-baked cosmic desert psych post-rock. BSE were out of Tucson, AZ, led by Jesus Acedo (another in the long line of brilliant musicians who succumbed to mental illness).

Jesus Acedo is the quixotic leader of Black Sun Ensemble who, on the basis of his enigmatic recordings, has been hailed by critics as one of the most innovative guitarists of our time.Born on Christmas Eve, 1962 in Tucson, Arizona, to Mexican immigrant parents, Acedo was one of eight children, the only one with an interest in music. After the death of his father in 1975, Acedo grieved by immersing himself in music. He spent most of his early adolescence at the Tucson public library listening to Ravi Shankar and Led Zeppelin records. At this time, Acedo bought a guitar. In high school, he began experimenting with the unique tunings of his guitar that give his music what one reviewer reverently called "peculiarly mystical, twangy, meditative, Middle Eastern rock sound". Muze, in describing his style, said he can "spit blasts of dragon fire or conjure the exotic, iridescent mystique of peacock feathers with a single stroke."A self-titled debut album was released by Tucson's Pyknotic Records in 1985. Its extraordinary qualities led Acedo to sign a five-year contract with England's Reckless Records, and in 1988 the label released "Black Sun Ensemble" (1988), "Lambent Flame" (1989) and "Elemental Forces" (1991). These records were a critical and commercial success. At the time, Offbeat exclaimed that BSE was "possibly, the world's coolest band." After touring the West Coast with Camper Van Beethoven in support of "Lambent Flame" the Ensemble was captured live on the first side of "Tragic Magic" (1992) for Rough Trade. The second side was a magical suite of mostly acoustic pieces that presaged the extensive title track of the later "Sky Pilot" CD.The inexorable weight of personnel changes, drugs and unexpected success eventually unbalanced Acedo's mental stability. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1992 and spent the next two years in and out of local hospitals. During his breakdown, the band recorded the ill-fated "Psycho Master El" album for Tucson's San Jacinto Records (1994). This record was remixed and remastered in 1998 for Camera Obscura Records. The results were issued as "Sky Pilot" in 1999, which also included rare Black Sun singles tracks and a brand new 20-minute work called "Sky Pilot Suite". "Sky Pilot" got rave reviews by critics and sold well locally and internationally. The Ensemble began playing regular gigs, impressing a whole new generation of listeners. News of Black Sun's return to the stage was appreciated by grunge-rock legend Mark Arm of Mudhoney, who engineered a shared performance at Tucson's Club Congress in early 2001. In February 2001, Camera Obscura reissued the debut Black Sun Ensemble recording from 1985, again to extraordinary reviews.On the wave of recent success, Acedo has brought himself back from madness, poverty and potential obscurity. He is now recapturing his old fire by re-inventing himself, and is working to re-establish his rightful place as one of the key guitarists of our time. This was reinforced by the 2002 CD "Hymn of the Master", and even more so by the 2003 CD "Starlight". BSE continue to be a hit at annual SXSW festivals and have complete a new album, "Bolt of Apollo" for release on Camera Obscura in the second half of 2006.


Biography from Camera Obscura website


Lambent Flame

Destroy All Monsters - Bored

Once again: proto-punk. Once again: Detroit. Ron Asheton of The Stooges on guitar, Mike Davis of the MC5 on bass, a piano-mover named Rob King on drums and a beautiful woman with a great voice named Niagra heading up the vocals. DAM are a legendary group and if one were to be unfamiliar, this seven-track compilation would be a perfect place to start affiliating with them.

Bored

The Outlaws - Dream of the West (1961) & The Blue Men - I Hear A New World (1960)

The Outlaws landed a recording contract with Joe Meek in 1960, Meek intending to have them act as backing band for an artist named Mike Berry. Upon realizing the band's talent, however, Joe decided that they needed to make a record of their own as well as back damn near every other recording artist under his auspices.


"Dream of the West is a concept album on the topic "The Wild West"... All 12 tunes are composed by Joe Meek under his standard pseudonym Robert Duke." The album is "interesting... because Joe Meek's trick of using a composition several times is played in triplicate here: the tracks 03, 08, and 12 can be found with different arrangements and titles on Meek's outer space suite I Hear A New World..." "...a twelve-part suite around the subject "life on the moon." Meek recorded the tracks mainly at his bedroom studio at Arundel Gardens on a borrowed stereo tape recorder (and probably secretly at night at Lansdowne Studio.) As Meek wrote in the liner notes "this is a strange record, I meant it to be."




An altogether fascinating man was Meek. These and other recordings I can't suggest or praise highly enough.






Dream of the West
I Hear A New World










Here's a really cool video someone put together of several songs from both albums.

Metacomet - Depression Ceremony (2010)

Long, plaintive and beautiful. Many bands which attempt the style mastered by Metacomet seem to succeed only in boring the living hell out of me. Not so with Metacomet's Depression Ceremony. Last.fm has this to say: "Metacomet is an ambient-psychedelic trio with Christina Boyd contributing vocals and Max Gardner and Ian Staub serenely dueling on their guitars. Since its evolution out of the primordial ooze of bedroom jams, Metacomet has established itself as an ongoing experiment in melding catchy hooks that embody the mute grandeur of "big skies" Americana with the meditative drone and melodic experimentation of psychedelic/experimental music traditions, especially German Kosmische Musik. The result is a sound that's warmingly familiar but maddeningly difficult to name or define."


Depression Ceremony

Elephant9 - Walk The Nile (2010)

Elephant9 are the prog-psych-jazz-rock Norwegian trio of keyboardist Stale Storlokken, bassist Nicolai Eilersten, and drummer Torstein Lofthus, all of whom were culled together from separate bands, Supersilent, National Bank, and Shining, respectively. Bands I know nothing about. "The instrumental group's heady blend of mid-70's Miles Davis, Deep Purple and Medeski, Martin and Wood has drawn considerable praise from both the jazz and rock communities worldwide." - Allmusic.com


Elephant9 somehow manage to blend vintage and contemporary sound effortlessly and come out with an aesthetic truly original and enjoyable.


Walk The Nile

Human Eye - They Came From the Sky (2011)

This generation's Alien Soundtracks. They Came From the Sky is an album involving alien abduction, cross-species impregnation, mind altering experiments and finally alien invasion. I'd be surprised, to say the least, if these guys didn't admit to a predilection for Chrome. Allmusic.com states that "[e]very so often, some brave or foolish or utterly unhinged band comes along and tries to reinvent punk rock, making the attempt to push the genre in new directions while trying to get the old beast snarling again. While most bands are content to call it a day after roughing things up a little, it's clear that for Detroit's Human Eye, that's simply not enough. On their third album, They Came From the Sky, the band doesn't just get in there and slap punk around a little, but rather they feed it LSD and wail on it with whatever happens to be lying around while shouting that the sky is falling, running the whole thing through some kind of ad hoc MK-ULTRA experiment designed to test the genre's limits. The psychedelic approach pays off for them as they run the raw power of punk through a garage-psych kaleidoscope, with driving jams like "Alien Freaks" alternating between pedal-to-the-metal intensity and Zappa-esque space rock freakouts."


Sacred Bones Records is doing great things.


They Came From The Sky

Swamp Dogg - Uncut And Classified 1A (1981)

Jerry Williams, Jr., AKA Swamp Dogg, is the singular most eccentric figure in soul music. Period. Writing minor hits for the likes of Gene Pitney, Tommy Hunt, Patti Labelle, The Commodores and Gary U.S. Bonds seemed to have run it's course in the sixties, at which time the liner notes for this album state "Swamp Dogg was born one mystical night in 1970. Born in the mind of an outwardly unassuming character who for the previous 28 years had masqueraded as Jerry Williams, Jr., an itinerant singer, writer and producer of little renown... Then came the night of the Dogg and the light of a New Day. Coming from a whole 'nother direction - Macon, Georgia, by way of a cerebral short-circuit - Swamp Dogg emerged with his "Total Destruction To Your Mind" album, the first of an occasional series of erratic but frequently sharp observations on the individual nature of the States and the state of its individuals. Unfortunately neither America nor the rest of the world were ready to be upbraided in so forthright a fashion, especially by a musician of no easily definable status. For whereas Jerry Williams, Jr. might have been type-cast as a regular soul singer, Swamp Dogg was no such animal. An eclectic beast, crossed between '50's R&B and blues, Southern white rock 'n' roll and the New Breed ideas of Sly Stone and George Clinton, the Dogg was an altogether unfamiliar mongrel whose music rarely fitted any known programming formula. As a rock encyclopedia commented in 1976, "Because of his healthy disregard for commercial trends he has not yet received widespread recognition, although he's becoming increasingly known for the powerful imagery in his songs.""

This album was recorded in March of '72 but was "too hot to handle at the time" and was shelved till it's eventual release in 1981.

Do The Dogg

Barrelhouse Mamas - Born In The Alley, Raised Up In The Slum

Beautifully restored rare and long, long out of print 78's by some of the leading chanteuses and pianists of 1920's & 30's rag and blues. Definitely the top choice for late night drinking by one's self. Songs about two-timing men, thwarted love, longing for love, being busted, drunk and down and out. It's all here and it's not all pretty. And these women belted it out. Brilliant and, for the times, necessary, use of double entendre abounds in the lyrics adding the possibility of prostitution and drug indulgences to be the topics of some songs. Overall a beautiful and oft-spooky collection.

Barrelhouse Mamas


*Digital damage on last two tracks

Logan's Sanctuary - Robert Joseph Manning, Jr & Brian Reitzell (2000)

I hear there's a remake of Logan's Run in the works. So I figure I'll drop this'n on ya's before we get bombarded with media hype and a quite potentially diminished effort resulting in disappointed nerds and raving teenagers who know without a doubt that this is the original; there can be no other. Sanctuary is the soundtrack to the hypothetical sequel to Run. Beautiful but somewhat meretricious synth pieces that very much evoke a 23rd century dystopian world. Should appeal to fans and philistines alike.


Sanctuary

The Mirrors - A Green Dream (2001)

Better than everything else put out in 2001. Psychedelic, but not overly so, with garage aesthetics and a punk edge. I'd go so far as to say it's in the upper echelon of recordings in the last decade. By the way, I'm finding it damn nigh impossible to find their other album, Thirteen Patient Flowers, or any of frontman Greg Ashley's other projects (besides the ones executed under his own name: Strate Coats or Sir Lord von Raven). Any help would be appreciated.

A Green Dream

Magic Lantern - Platoon (2010) & Showstopper 7" (2010)

Apparently the final album by the Lantern, and a shame at that. While member Cameron Stallones continues blazing ever-onward with his project Sun Araw (and we love it around here), I'm still a little heartbroken at the loss of one of the best modern purveyors of deep space psych, echo-and-wah-laden, organ wailing behemoths. These guys have a direct line to past masters such as Can, Amon Duul II, Popol Vuh, etc. Kraut via California.

Platoon & Showstopper

Showstopper is the 7-inch that accompanies this album. Containing an amazing cover of Iron Knowledge's deep funk classic, 'Showstopper.' B-side 'Cyprus' funks pretty hard as well.

Fuzzhead - LSD (1992)

There seems to be not much information out there on this band. What is known is that Fuzzhead is the project of one Bill Weita from Kent, OH, and has been active since 1989. "The recordings are basically garage-psychedelic freakouts, lengthy and totally improvised space jams that attain an almost evil quality thanks to an unusually noisy background." Sound good?

LSD

The Gories - I Know You Fine, But How You Doin' (1990)

I can't (off the top of my head) think of a band from Detroit that sucks. The Gories are no exception to this sweeping generalization. No bullshit blues-encrusted garage punk. Poor Motor City, what has become of you?

Gories