somewhat excited when i got my slightly grubby mitts on this. making noises chock full of voiceless glottal plosives. not the original pressing from way back, of which there were about three copies. each personally spirally carved into vinyl by the ghost of sky saxon. nope, jeebus don’t rate me that highly. it’s a repress, on vinyl, 700 copies through gear fab and void records. a shiny glossy perfect reproduction of what other folk call a lost classic. not that it was really lost, just an uber-limited private pressing that exists like some pvc holy grail for garage freaks and vinyl junkies.
the entire chicagoans output, a musical one-off, never to be repeated, was captured on record in one day with an aural hello, how are you, nice legs, touching naughty parts, trousers back on, farewell. said what they had to say and fucked off. and i guess that’s what makes it kinda special, what adds to the holy vestal virginal vibe. if only more would follow that lead…
so what d’ya get for your buck?
what you don’t get are any covers. which makes a change from the endless four chord variations of keep a knockin’ et al these kinds of buggers chucked out for twenty years. and are still banging out…
what you don’t get are any clunkers. it’s like a distillation of an an entire career (which essentially it was) into one perfect once in a lifetime greatest hits psych-garage record. but it still swoons and swings like a proper goddam album not a mere collection.
it’s a mixture of the stompy garage, jangly darkness and lonesome psyche ballad. all wrapped up in a shitload of reverb. the production’s pretty sweet despite what you might have heard. chock fulla crude, fuzzy, echoing garagey goodness.buttwo tracks slap bang in the middle of the album (or ending side one and starting side two of yr lp) show how much more is on offer beyond this.
minister to a mind diseased has some soloing of such startling voltage you’ll think the pastpresentfuture of electric fuzz has been channeled into one awesome screech and sent through time direct to yr moist and willing earhole by an unholy union of charles manson and the velvets at the fag-end of the sixties dream. man.
then:
the drugged up loved up stumbling beauty of an acid skewed ballad that is tables of grass fields. as jangly and lovely and summers day grin inducing as the previous track is sinisterly rattling.
it ends (ignoring the tacked on live track), as all things must, with i’m a little boy delivering all the psychedelic splattered rock yr fragile mind can take. vocal wails, mindless distortogeetar and drumming that’ll make you cream. you can see the joyous sneers slapped across their faces.
