#thirtythreeandonethird

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Monday morning spins. #LP #thirtythreeandonethird (at Ollie the Trolley) https://www.instagram.com/p/BtL89e5gRkN/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=zf3v40v731rv

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#今日のおめざ #GeorgeHarrison #ThirtyThreeAndOneThird #nowplaying #vynil

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#georgeharrison #thirtythreeandonethird #daddy

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Average White Band

AWB

Average White Band

Atlantic, 1974

You Got It

Got The Love

Pick Up the Pieces

Person to Person

Work to Do

Nothing You Can Do

Just Wanna Love You Tonight

Keepin’ It to Myself

I Just Can’t Give You Up

There’s Always Someone Waiting

The Average White Band blends the blue-eyed soul of Orleans with the light r&b and funk feel of bands like Ace and the Doobie Brothers. It sounds like a whole host of early seventies bands attempting to do this same task, but the group’s second eponymous record is a cut above because of the instrumental, Pick Up the Pieces. The majority of the songs on the album don’t have the grittiness of Pick Up but the record does groove to some degree.

While the opening number You Got It is forgettable fluff, the following number, Got The Love is a clavinet-underpinned piece that features a unison refrain in sweet harmony in a technique popularized by groups like the Spinners. The band shouts down the “got the love!” refrain as if from on high to back the lead singer up, Hamish Stuart. His voice is a caricature of itself, overly growly and sensual and full of “oohs” and occasional breathiness. The drummer keeps a steady sixteenth rhythm that is the chassis for any good dance track, and keeps it churning throughout the song. The success of Got The Love sets up the third track on the record, and the record’s only strong number, Pick Up the Pieces.

The ordinary introduction as the band vamps together over a strong central organ disguises the tight, funky groove the band will split into in a moment. The instruments coalesce into punchy solid pattern, guitar, bass, tambourine and drums holding down the time while the brass bip and bop the main melodic lines. The song, because it lacks lyrics, avoids the cliches of the rest of the band’s material and doesn’t struggle to get toes tapping. Its melody is infectious, giving way to the apex of the song, the gritty repeat of “Pick up the pieces\uh huh!” as a woodblock part taps its way in. The brass then switches to a swell off beat cadence to complement a saxophone solo. The band vamps one more time and then they march off down the road toward a tight unison ending. As soon as the band finishes their mini-masterpiece, they take a well-earned rest in the form of Person to Person, a veiled rewrite of the hypnotic Woman to Woman, equipped with more capable, yet slightly goofy vocals from Stuart.

Side one’s finale is also the side’s longest track- Work to Do. It rings with a massive brass fanfare to open and drops into a steady funk groove that is very circular in nature. Alan Gorrie takes lead vocals and imitates Steve Winwood. His high, arching voice aches with passion, adding some life to the banal and pointless lyrics. Hamish Stuart helps out on the refrains, as the band once again socks it to the listener with a cascade of sound. The band ends with a funky “work\work” chirp which is entertaining.

Side two’s only noteworthy track is Nothing You Can Do, which sounds as though the band was commissioned to write a new theme for the Golden Girls TV show. It’s soft and bouncy relying on a rimshot from drummer Robbie McIntosh to keep time. The lyrics are devotional and well sung, and as whole the song sounds like the Rolling Stones weaker efforts during their glam rock phase (tracks like Time Waits For No One), which heavily emphasize falsetto vocals and swirling electric piano or clav.

Overall, the album is fairly dull, Pick Up the Pieces otherwise justifying mediocre funk and blue-eyed soul tunes. The sexiness of other big funk acts of the day is simply not present on this album. It rings a bit hollow and places more emphasis on r&b than funk.

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10,000 Steps

10000 Lepes

Omega

Qualiton, 1969

Kerosene Lamp

Girl With Pearl’s Hair

Firestorm

Bread of the Court Jester

Callous Handed Wood Cutters

Prodigal Sons

Tens of Thousands of Steps

In The 1958 Boogie Woogie Club

Legend of the Spanish Guitar

Interrupted Concert

In the Soviet bloc, attitudes towards rock and roll and its perceived Western decadence had thawed slightly by 1969. Once forbidden, rock and rollers now stepped into the spotlight, getting their records released on the state-owned labels, and spots on TV. One of the many rock bands incubated in the Soviet bloc was the monstrously popular Omega, one of Hungary’s most beloved bands who are celebrating their 50th anniversary this year of near non-stop music making. 10000 Lepes (Ten Thousand Steps) was the band’s second effort and delved into Mellotron heavy anthems in direct contrast with the more youthful, Merseybeat-esque pop of Omega, Red Star Of Hungary, their first record. The diversity is amazing, the psychedelic rock seamlessly gives way to pop, and even blues finds its way onto the record with the closing number Interrupted Concert. The album, coming in the shadow of the Prague Spring and the outpouring of the counterculture contains no overt political references, just allusions to everyday items and people.

The album starts off with an incredibly bouncy and chipper uncontroversial track, Kerosene Lamp, but it is nothing but a comedic footnote to the raw power of Girl With Pearl’s Hair. Opening softly with the downward trickle of an organ, a flowering guitar solo, it quickly blossoms into a heavy, Mellotron powered groove. The tempo is impossibly slow and majestic, the main theme ringing throughout the track. The main verses are treated with reverential respect, the heaviness of the refrain evaporates and places all weight in the soft, broken vocals of Janós Kóbor, the bushy blonde’s voice gliding around complex Hungarian words. The ending of the song, sampled in Kanye’s New Slaves, is a powerful duo of Kóbor’s screams and the rest of the band solemnly intoning “la la lalalala” in tandem with the main melodic riff. The drums are ringing and metallic, the guitars wail and scream, and the hymn from outer space takes off back into the clouds. 

The rest of side one is an interesting mix of two fairly conventional pop songs, and the unusual jam, Callous Handed Wood Cutters. It begins with the sound of lumberjacks at work, an occasional bird call splitting the sound of sawing (“hello sawing my old friend\I’ve come to talk with you again”). The band then embarks on a slow, meandering jam to fill space. The flute soloing gets annoying fast, and the track wanders aimlessly into more sound effects to close it out.

Side two’s track Tens of Thousands of Steps follows the model of Girl With Pearl’s Hair. It begins with a piano hammering out the chords over a steady one-and-a-two drumbeat, before the deep male voices once again intone a preview of the main melody. The vocal workout for Kóbor is just the same, a lot of high notes blended in with unpretentious softer lines. Each of the guitar solos is cued in by a hiccuped scream from Kóbor, who could keep company among the heavy metal crowd. 

Side two is demonstrates the band’s genre jumping, with traditional boogie woogie coming in 1958 Boogie Woogie Club, and the aforementioned blues of Interrupted Concert. It’s an impressive spread of styles, and Omega masters each of them.

After a followup, Omega abandoned their more pop feel and tried on metal for size. They have continued to have success, but nothing touches the rock found on the group’s second and third records. Overall, the band displays an intriguing mix of genres that blend together. It’s like the cover of the record. The groups faces peer out of bushes, each face distinct, but blended together into one unified.

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Ars Longa Vita Brevis

Ars Longa Vita Brevis

The Nice

CBSP, 1969

America

2nd Amendment

Daddy Where Did I Come From

Little Arabella

Happy Freuds

Intermezzo from the Karelia Suite

Son Edito El Gruva

Ars Longa Vita Brevis:

Prelude

1st Movement: Awakening

2nd Movement: Realization

3rd Movement: Acceptance

4th Movement: Denial

Coda: Extension to the Big Move

Ars Longa Vita Brevis is one half pop farce and one half classical masterpiece that echoes the ambitious work Keith Emerson would attempt with ELP. For now the Nice is content to play progressive rock games for side one, before letting a full classical suite take up side two. It’s essentially the “Keith Emerson album”, as his piano and organ work are critical to the tracks, replacing a lead guitar, and his vocals are most prevalent, except where the higher backing vocals of Lee Jackson are present.

The beginning of the album is a bang-on rendition of Leonard Bernstein’s America. Emerson’s fingers fly over organ keys as Brian Davison and Lee Jackson struggle to hold their own, though they do. It’s the dexterity of the playing that carries the song which is otherwise repetitive.

The album’s most joyous track is the jazzy Little Arabella, which further adds a comic flavor to to the record after the jokey punch of America and the jocular toot that is Daddy Where Did I Come From. Arabella is a wild child of the 60’s, unconstrained and rearing to go. Emerson’s vocals are delivered practically in your ear, making the track unsettling and a bit bizarre, but the lyrics are clever and excellent, and the omnipresent organ fleshes out the song with musical color. Drummer Brian Davison keeps locked on to the tempo with a light swing of brushes, while the bass works its way up and down the frets. A randy piano also bangs its way through the track, and there are a few humorous sounds (“smoke coming out of her head” is accompanied by a hissing). The track dissolves into a tick-tock groove while the three members of the Nice take turns saying absurd things, until the babble overpowers the instruments and the song finishes.

Happy Freuds is an excellent finger-pointing song as it rocks on a steady, bouncing beat before dissolving into cymbal rolls and organ powered experimentation. The thick accent of lead vocalist Keith Emerson dominates the song, as he does on all track but the suite on side two. 

There’s almost too much instrumental work on the record for its own good, as many of them are a bit dreary and not particularly inspired, trying as hard they can to be pretentious and failing. Instead it comes across as an awkward mix of jazz drumming and classical organ-eering. Nevertheless, the album gets points from the critics for being diverse and displaying musical skill.

Ars Longa Vita Brevis is a dense record, but it doesn’t leave much to talk about, it’s simply too good. It’s a bit dull, but technically flawless and offers an avenue into prog that doesn’t challenge the listener.

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Mashmakhan

Mashmakhan

Mashmakhan

Epic, 1970

Days When We Are Free

I Know I’ve Been Wrong

As the Years Go By

Shades of Lonliness

Afraid of Losing You

Gladwin

If I Tried

Happy You Should Be

Nature’s Love Song

Letter From Zambia

Mashmakhan is to vocal arrangements what Blood, Sweat, and Tears is to brass- they’re lush, ornate, and complex. Every track melds various song snatches together into one whole being, mostly with jazz undertones. Jazz fusion and psychedelic rock are at the heart of Mashmakhan, the Canadian band’s first album. They would release one more and then call it quits after unsuccessful sales.

Most of the music on this eponymous debut is achingly beautiful and rather dense. This is particularly evident on I Know I’ve Been Wrong, which ends in a huge rave up as bass player Brian Edwards flies up his frets while Rayburn Blake, the lead singer cries out in desperation “Let’s talk it over!” The song takes off after a fairly subdued introduction and angelic vocal part. 

Days When We Are Free opens the album with a frantic groove, the drummer must be sweating keeping it up. This evaporates into a relaxed pace, where a Zappa-esque guitars solo ensues. The haunting block harmonies carry on throughout the song despite its varying parts. The general motif is that at the end of the rainbow we will be free in our mind and body, somehow. While most bands would continue on and use the song as a guitar workout, Mashmakhan ably supplies a narrative to supplement.

At the same time as they rock Mashmakhan can croon through schmaltzy pap like Happy You Should Be about a love affair turned sour. The melody is powered by gentle guitars, lush strings, and brass, and sounds as though it came straight from a Burt Bacharach record.

The album’s only weak link is the filler in the form of a “jazz” jam called Letter From Zambia. It drags on at over six minutes while featuring a vaguely racist tribal sound of rattles and flute soloing in a vain effort to give that exotic vibe it needs. There’s even a few bird calls to add to the mess at the opening of the track. It’s good music for massage therapy and little else. The song doesn’t even touch on Zambia’s political issues (the dictatorship of Hastings Banda), leaving me to believe they picked the state to simply sound exotic.

Even though Mashmakhan underperformed on the charts, it remains one of the hidden gems of 1970. It is one of my favorite albums, and deserves to be bought, despite its low points.

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Day Blindness

Day Blindness

Day Blindness

Studio, 1969

Still Life Girl

Jazz Song

Middle Class Lament

I Got No Money

House and a Dog

Live Deep

Young Girl Blues

Holy Land

Day Blindness are the Doors’ less insidious, more hard-rocking siblings. They cast off the gentle, refined creepiness and the elegant Morrison poetry of the Doors to produce a heavier sound still with emphasis on the mighty Farfisa, Wurlitzer, whatever organ. Day Blindness has an amateur sound and feel, after all their eponymous debut’s cover is drawn in marker (though cooly enough, one band member has the Beatles in the background of his photo on the rear of the cover). Nevertheless, the band forges a path through new territory, combining the riffs and grooves of the James Gang with the organ and cadence of the Doors, with a little Iron Butterfly thrown in. It’s entirely possible all these elements coming together are not coincidental, as Day Blindness were in Los Angeles around the same time the Doors and Iron Butterfly were cutting records. The band follows some of Butterfly’s style by using their songs as blues workouts, which are substantially longer than the psychedelic songs Iron Butterfly put out.

The band’s songs never allude to it, but Day Blindness’ drug use is an apparent point of pride, as the jacket advertises the record as a product “of many trips”, while mysterious potions and smoking joints dot the rear of the cover.

Unlike the Doors, who were never ones for the culture wars of the sixties (though they made the odd political statement), Day Blindness tackles the plasticity of the middle class dream with the song Middle Class Lament. Sounding a bit like the Bonzo Dog Band, another group that poked fun at British middle class morals and attitudes, the protagonist bemoans his dreary life now that he’s settled down and found a job. The band wails away inappropriately heavily behind the vocalist, most likely guitarist Gary Pihl. The organ, played by Felix Bria, the only non-vocalist in the trio (drummer Dave Mitchell sang as well), is always at the center of attention even though there are guitar solos and words to be sung.

Side two demonstrates the band’s imitations of the Doors to a T. Live Deep is the side’s opener, which swings pretty hard (the Doors’ default rhythm) and is sung with a Jim Morrison cadence- velvety, and trailing off at the end. Holy Land is a copy of The End. Built around a hypnotic bass line, it gently builds the track under the soft, smug voice of Gary Pihl. The beginning of the song is a messy jam that goes nowhere eternally, but as if out of thin air, a Latin groove drops down and Pihl begins asking questions of his “mother” and “father”. Sound like familiar motifs? This groove leads to an organ solo that could easily have been one of Ray Manzarek’s.

Day Blindness skimps on both quality and lyrics, preferring drawn out blues jams and guitar solos to actual content. But that doesn’t mean the album is bad- it just doesn’t stand out in a crowded field.