April Fool Dept.

 

The Fool's only album remains their first and last. To be fair, they weren't musicians first, or even much at all. They were acid-etched rainbow-eyed harbingers of the Aquarian Apocalypse, and the effect they had on Bakelite Britain, all brown ale and fag-ash, was explosive and over almost before it happened, like the Apple Boutique, like a dream.

The music's infinitely better than you might expect, if you're expecting something quite dreadful, and beautifully produced by Graham Nash. Yes, there's finger cymbals and recorders, bagpipes and minstrelsy, and groovy sounds abound, but it's at least as good as The Incredible String Band and/or Doctor Strangely Strange, better than Black Oak Arkansas, and if you let it float into your mind on a cascading breeze of yesterday's unicorns, you'll be a better person. Allmusic gives it four stars, which seems a little mean.

Light a joss stick. Tie a scarf to your tambourine.

 

This post funded in part by Wacky Wobblehead's Wildebeest World, Walla Walla, WA

 

 

 

 

 

The SMiLE You Send Out Dept. - Jack's Mix

Here ya go, Jack, have a new cover!

 

If like me you're a little too obsessed with SMiLE to be considered quite safe to be around, you'll embrace this new mix to your hollow bosom with hoarse hosannas and squirty tears. It's by Jack, that's his name, and it's on YewChewb and now it's downloadable here with a new cover. It's of the kitchen sink everything-in school, and there's extensive use of AI, so that may be a dealbreaker for you. If you listen to it as a piece of music, without any thought bias getting in the way, it's a lovely thing. I don't prefer it to (say) Thirty Minute SMiLE, because that for me has the original magic in its DNA, something indefinable soaked right into the mix of voices and instruments, all the Beach Boys, all Brian, an alchemy of people and time and place that will never happen again. But the beauty of SMiLE is that it will continue to inspire new interpretations (much like a canonical classical composition) and they can and should be enjoyed as just that; as performances of a work of art. Technology has enabled an entirely new field of music, and it'd be a missed opportunity if we closed our ears to it. None of this affects the original recordings, they're untouched. This is a performance of a composition. All performance is interpretive and not definitive.

Anyway, it flows like a river, and the new material seems very successful. In spite of leaving virtually nothing out, it lasts an entirely reasonable fifty minutes. It's a keeper. The beginning - dropping a dime into a jukebox - is inspired, and there are many wow moments throughout. Out-freaking-standing!

More SMiLEs here and there

 

This post homologated by Swivel-Eye Loons For SMiLE™ 

 

 

Math Rock Just Doesn't Add Up Dept. - Automatic Fine Tuning

I like this album (which almost inevitably I "had on vinyl back in the day") more than I should. It goes against so much of what I hold dear - the values of the traditional family fireside; crumpets oozing melted butter, Children's Hour on the wireless, the drone of the Spitfires overhead, the crack of willow against leather on the village green, snorting blow off a hooker's tit in a roadhouse toilet on Christmas Eve ...

It's challenging, except not. It should be challenging. One rigorously composed thirty-minute instrumental split over two sides, a shorter instrumental named after the flowers your Grandmama liked to steal from the crematorium on her way home from the off-licence, and a slightly grunty attempt at a hit single, the only vocals on the album. Twin guitars playing relatively complex pseudo-classical themes and taking breaks for ripping nostril-hair shred solos. It's relentless. I mean, I should hate it, but it slips through very pleasurably.

AFT may be an early example of Math Rock before Math Rock sucked all the fun out of it. Which brings me to Angine de Poitrine [Fr. Chest Fever - Ed.] with their challenging microtonal noodling and playfully dada-esque image [left - Ed]. They're undoubtedly clever, but it all revolves around counting off patterns, not my cracker salt, and I can't help thinking they need Captain Beefheart doing his thing in the foreground. 

 

 

 

This post funded in part by Babs Tabs n'Crabs, Pork Bend, OH

 

 

Hicks From The Sticks Dept.

Dan Hicks. Winner of Okayest Dude award six years running. Swell musician, songwriter, great pinochle player. Inventor of Pickleball®, and First Cowboy On The Moon. What more need be said? He was the most talented original Charlatan (a pretty low bar), and pioneered the use of oleomargarine in contract flooring. His portrait, by Leonard Nimoy, hangs in the Vatican. September 3rd has been named Dan Hicks day in Spitoon County, Colorado. He owned the world's largest private collection of Oil Rigs, and kept axolotls.

But enough of this dry historical encomium. The important thing is, fun. 

 

This post encouraged by the interest of 4/5g© D, CA

It's Th' Zorn Zone! Dept.

 

This just in! ZornStock© will be held this year at the Groban Supply Co. lot in leafy downtown Burnside, Chicago!

Zorn, left, and Mrs. Myra Nussbaum approve location, yestiddy!

 

"It's really the dream ZornStock© venue!" gushed the challenging saxophone stylist yesterday. "The dystopian æsthetic will lend post-holocaust feels to the première of my Missa Novus Ordo Depressivus, which lasts just short of two days if we live that long!"

Longtime collaborator and Event Hostess Mrs. Myra Nussbaum agrees! "I'm cooking some of my world famous Schnitzengrüben Patties whilst doing interpretive dance!"

The Kronos Quartet have been booked as support, and wacky funster Fred Frith will be forcing kids to inflate imaginary balloon animals in the Tots' Tent! Tickets are still available, so pre-order now to avoid disappointment!

 

This post autoclaved in the burning fiery brain fever of hot season Siam!