Give The Drummer Some (More)

Anyone in possession of a master's degree in Applied Psychedelic Research will be familiar with the two albums by HP Lovecraft. The first [HP Lovecraft - Ed.] is a superb example of folk-rock pushing the envelope into psychedelia. The second [HP Lovecraft II - Ed.] was apparently - obviously, really - recorded while the band was tripped out of its collective skull. From the day-glo disrupted mosaic of the cover through to the powerful contact high contained in that innocent-looking groove, it's the album I will play for the Martians, when they land and want to learn all they can about psychedelia while their flying saucer refuels for the long trip back to the Red Planet. There is simply none more. After that, it's difficult to see where they could have gone. The band broke up, partially got back together, then Michael Tegza, after a stint with the unfairly ignored Bangor Flying Circus, formed a band called Lovecraft with him as the sole surviving member of the original line-up plus musicians from the faaaahbulous Aorta and Marty Grebb from The Buckinghams (yay!). If you were anything like me you probably curled your lip at it in the racks and moved on past its throat-slashingly dull cover, tut-tutting at such a cheap and blatant cash-in. And you'd have been wrong. So very wrong.

It's a great album. In fact, if you didn't know its story, it seems exactly like the third album they never made. Even with only the drummer remaining. The glory days of psychedelia were pretty much over by 1970 (some would argue three years earlier), and this album is as representative of its time as the previous two had been. So what you get is a bunch of great songs, sung and played by a bunch of great musicians. In a shit cover. The harmonies, the guitars, the drums ... everything is a joy. Although it's sadly true to say that we will not hear its like again (what with music being made by algorithms running the Instagram likes of an entire generation of phone-stroking fools) we didn't hear it at the time either, or most of us didn't. It's not too late, though. You can grab it here and pretend to your friends that you always dug it, man. Like I do!

EDIT: The FMF postbag has been bulging with requests for Tegza's previous album. "You better of post that Banger Flying circus ablum" writes a Mr Schneider from Los Angeles, "I know where you live. Shame if something happen to them dogs a your's." It's a pleasure to oblige, sir!