Week 9: Bonzo Dog Band - Keynsham

As a rule I try to steer clear of these sort of knowingly 'wacky' records that seemed so abundant in the 60's and 70's, and as such never paid too much attention to the Bonzo Dog Band. Having recently stumbled across a Keynsham however, I found myself drawn by it's title - a small and not particularly cool civil parish near where I grew up. Musically the album is pretty adept, with some quite lovely arrangements spread across guitars, drums, horns, flutes and basses, all held together by lyrics than oscillate from the overwrought prog fare one might expect, and the intensely silly. The album harbours a penchant for sudden changes in style and various spoken word/comedy segments, akin to Monty Python, and manages to be (nearly) as funny. Gems such as Tent offer up passages such as 'my love is so inscrutable / in a stoic sort of way / my baby is as beautiful / as a tourniquet' in a charged, almost punkish manner, whilst the operatic Sport has a wonderfully overblown chorus, ostensibly about the wonders of P.E.
Lyrics aside, there is actually some surprisingly contemporary aspects at play - whilst many of the tracks sound a bit like The Beatles (or perhaps more suitably, The Rutles), tracks like Noises for my leg sound like an early incarnation of Add N to X, and there are even a few dashes of what might be considered Musique Concrete, were it in any other context.

Were this an entirely serious late 60's pop/rock album, it would be a very, very good one. I fear the addition of humour relegates it to 'oddity' rather than 'classic', perhaps explaining it's lack of commercial success, especially given it comes not long after the bands fairly popular television show.

Week 8: Signol - Logan Systems EP

Ok, so it might be a bit of a stretch to call this either a 'Charity shop' find, or for that matter a 'gem', but this is a record of note one-the-less. Discovered in a box marked 'free records!' left outside a local pub, this was one of several fairly unbearable forays into drum 'n bass / dub-step territory left out upon the pavement, all of which are, on first listen, pretty bloody trite. This particular 12' however, has that peculiar charm wherein a not-very-good record thats played at the wrong speed, suddenly becomes quite-a-good record after all. Gone are the ADHD beats of the original, gone are the all too rhythmic wub-wubs - in their stead we are left with a jaunty, almost early-electro beat, and a pulsing, robotic bass-line straight from the bowels of some swing-less, impossible to program 80's sequencer. Everything about this record improves with a drop in speed - it's both heavier and less cheesy, it's timbres more delicate, less obviously constructed from a 'massive' preset. I could be being hard on the original - it's genre is so far from my cup of tea that its virtually Horlicks (does that work? Probably not). The fact remains however, that it is a far superior record with a nice bit of jaunt.

This is the moment where I would normally provide a link.. however such is the obscurity of this catch, that I can find literally nothing about it online - it's record label has closed down, the artist has a soundcloud page but has not uploaded any music to it, and the record is not held by a single online distributor in any form. In absence of any audio or visual addendums to the Logan Systems EP, I will leave you instead with the next best thing - a poster from the similarly epithetic Logans Run:

Week 7: Golden Avatar - a change of heart

Only days after the pope announces plans to release a God-themed prog-rock album, I stumble across this similar effort by Golden Avatar, dedicated to the wonders of the Hare Krishna's own Vedic beliefs.  What is ostensibly a fairly standard folk-prog affair, is lifted into the realms of oddity by both the pronounced nature of its theme - replete with multiple "Hare Krishna" chants per song - and its propensity for cheesy, orchestral jazz and funk sweeps. The lyrical content - often the downfall o f such albums - manages to avoid any horrendous mis-steps (despite repeatedly referencing 'the soul' and other potential cliches), and there are some genuinely epic riffs underpinning it all. Far catchier than many of the more famous examples of the genre, and yet concurrently far less pompous, the album is the kind that makes you wonder why it relishes in relative obscurity, whilst the likes of Yes!, ELP, or even Pink Floyd have become household names. I suspect the answer lies in its more heart-felt approach - though offering the convoluted trimmings the prog genre is known for, its content is grounded in a very real, very earnest belief in its subject matter. It also has a fine drawing of some fairies on the front cover.