Kollision In Kartoonistan

Everyone knows that Leonard Cohen got Kaleidoscope (Chester Crill, Chris Darrow, Solomon Feldthouse and David Lindley) to play on his first album. But not everyone knows about their last couple of studio albums, When Scopes Collide and Greetings From Kartoonistan (We Ain't Dead Yet).

The band (Brotman, Crill, Darrow, Feldthouse, Lagos, with Lindley sitting in) signed to Nesmith's Pacific Arts for their reunion album in '76, six years after Bernice, an album which stubbornly resists critical reappraisal as anything more than disappointing. When Scopes Collide is pretty darn good, and if the wild electric thrill of the earlier albums is absent, it was missing from the times, too.

We had to wait until '91 for the band to get its mojo back, when the same line-up (minus Lindley) cut the unlikely return-to-form Greetings From Kartoonistan, which would have made a swell follow-up to Incredible, all those years ago, and is much truer to the founding spirit of the band than Bernice.

Where Scopes was a little tired, this fizzes and bounces with energy. It's an unexpected delight and an under-appreciated swansong from one of the finest sixties bands.