Week 10 - The Neutrons: Black Hole Star

Not to be confused with Soundgarden's Black Hole Sun, I stumbled across The Neutron's Black Hole Star on a recent flea-market rummage, and mainly bought it because tyhe cover is all silvery and spacey. Current obsession with space-pop and synthy-psychedlia meant I was compelled.
What actually comes out of the speakers when needle hits groove is quite unexpected. Where I expected to hear Moogs and Mellotrons I basically get traditional Prog Rock arrangements. Which is fine, and some of the songs are really good. But I was a bit disappointed.
It is, nevertheless, a gem... the album works as an opus, each song leading into the next in a really pleasant way, and there are some lovely changes of pace. It's not John Keating, but it is rather good. Plus it's got a song called Dance of the Psychedelic Lounge Lizards. Which can't not be a good thing.
Best track: Mermaid and Chips

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.

Week 6 Le Steel-Band De La Trinidad ‎– Magie Caraïbe

This week, we welcome our esteemed guest contributor Dan Wall from Funky Navigation, to provide our features...

When Ralph MacDonald sang 'You need more Calypso in your life' he wasn't playin' with ya; you probably do ...and he knew it. There's nothing like a bit of Calypso to raise the spirits and inject some Caribbean swag into your stride. It's like Berocca for the ears. 

Despite the rather ordinary and unassuming title title, this Charity Shop Gem of The Week is no ordinary Calypso LP.  What you get here is an alternate take on the sound of Trinidad; this is a Trinidad after-party, the type not advertised to tourists. Gone is the usual gaiety synonymous with steel bands, this has a different vision, a dark side. The arrangements are sublime, some straight pan, others mixing conga and electric guitar. The tune selection is also pretty surprising. 'Coming Home' is a tidy, low-slung version of the Ben Tucker penned tune 'Coming Home, Baby',  popularised by Mel Torme. The arrangement and lazy vocal styling on their cover of Gershwin's 'Summertime' is so insanely good, one can feel an instant increase in temperature and humidity as it plays. Then there is their unique proto-reggae take on the traditional island ballad - 'L'Homme A La Grosse Tête'; a bitter sweet song full of disillusionment and sorrowful observation, which at 1.57 minutes is the aural equivalent of a shot of Angostura Legacy Rum. If that alone doesn't hook you there are also two original numbers from steel pan legend - Desmond Bowen (sadly no longer with us) that suitably demonstrates that these boys knew exactly what they were doing. The latter of which, 'Calypso Jazz improvisation', can be heard on this Month's Curious Music For Curious People podcast.

Week 5: Chicago - I'm a Man (7" live version)

The eagle-eyed may notice that Week 3 and 4 have been announced on the same day. Your CMFCP correspondents were sunning themselves in Turkey last week so you'l excuse our poor time-keeping...

Middle of the road Dad-rockers Chicago step up for Week 4's instalment of Charity Shop Gem of the Week. Except on this record, found in a charity shop bin for 99p, they're about as far from middle of the road as can be!
1969 single I'm a Man, a cover of the Spencer Davis Group hit, is a brutal, almost tribal freakout that has been a mainstay of my DJ sets for 10 years. I just had to share it with you as it has possibly the greatest drum solo of all time. Where the later studio recording is clean, polished and by comparison unremarkable, this is an assault on the ears from a band going full throttle!
The first drum solo lasts about 90 seconds and starts about a minute into the song... it's a fucking bold move but the intensity and raw energy is astonishing. I haven't found this version anywhere on the web so I may upload it to youtube myself, but in the meantime, here's a similar live recording from about the same era. You get the gist, but trust me the 7" version is bonkers!

Week 4: People in Sorrow

Offering little info upon its battered sleeve than the title and date of recording, this appears to be a late sixties live jam by Lester Bowie and his cohorts, with a somewhat abstract, somber bent. Eschewing the playful, upbeat jazz of other Art Ensemble... albums, both of the 20-minutes cuts on offer here are beautifully sparse, with the pops and clicks of the record grooves often more present than the music proper. A meandering marimba (?) propagates throughout, accompanied by the occasionally light percussion or brass, and an underlying (if not omnipresent) bass, with every instrument willing to give the others an abundance of space. The groups competence shines not in fast playing and difficult riffs, but rather in the ability of multiple instruments to emerge at once from a seemingly infinite nothingness in perfect harmony, a sudden burst of flowing bass and melodic trumpet that soon falls back into the intermittent wash of throaty sax purrs and lazy percussion. Even at its most active the music doesn't appear to actually be going anywhere - bass-lines and saxophone solos appear to have no discernible stat or end,  looping perpetually with neither repetition or variation, only to be unceremoniously lost in a creeping flux of bells or primitive yells. It sounds a world away from 'experimental' jazz as we have come to expect, invoking a far more ritualistic, organic form, and is utterly captivating throughout.