In which the Melodic Energy Commission, Vancouver based pychedelicists hook up with a Hawkwind refugee, ignore all the punk rock and vitriol that’s raging around them at the time, go deep and high instead, and deliver an essential travelogue for those keen on exploring the great beyond within. The album’s called Stranger in Mystery and the whole thing’s a trip.
“In which Canada’s The Guess Who, on the verge of genuine BIGness (they’d be outselling the Beatles in 1970), smell the wheat and get cosmic, reference the Bible and otherwise lay down the elusive truth for all god’s children. Seriously, note the title. It’s not The Key, but simply, significantly, psychedelically KEY.” (Philip Random)
They sold their share of records, but Love and Rockets never really got the respect they deserved. Serious fans of Bauhaus (the band from which all three had come) stayed huddled together in windowless rooms awaiting the resurrection of their main man, Peter Murphy (which never really happened). Serious art types were too busy getting their ears shredded by the likes of The Jesus + Mary Chain. Meanwhile David Jay, Kevin Haskins and Daniel Ash kept cranking out some of the coolest, best psychedelic sounds since the 1960s.
“Dr. John (aka Mac Rebennack) serves up some genuinely weird gumbo with one of those songs that sound exactly like what they’re about, not that I’m remotely clear what this is about. Except how could it not be about great primordial swamps, and heat, and weird stews laced with certain medicinal ingredients, which thus take one well beyond normal notions of space, time, meaning, unmeaning. From 1971’s The Sun Moon + Herbs, one of those albums that’s always existed way outside of time, both backward looking and still lightyears beyond any now that’s ever been. I’d call it beautiful but that would just confuse things.” (Philip Random)
“A Sonic Youth song about Joni Mitchell (or so I think I read somewhere years ago), found on 1988’s Daydream Nation, a four-sided psychedelic monster if there ever was one (even if it did show up in a most un-psychedelic year). Or whatever. I’ve always had trouble putting words to Daydream Nation kicking as it did through all the gloom and permafrost of its time, like an unexpected future full of cool and fierce and infinitely complex noise, and in that complexity hope, I guess. Because I did need it.” (Philip Random)
The band known as Yes from when they were still just hard working wannabes (a guitar genius and a keyboard wizard short of achieving true escape velocity). Like future teenagers, drunk on stolen psychedelics, joyriding in dad’s spaceship, trying to get the damned thing off the ground, not quite getting there, but beautiful anyway. And it rocks.
Randophonic 