Things have taken a surprisingly heavy turn in the Quality of Mercury camp. ‘The Voyager’ – the first single and title track from the band’s second album opens with a riff that, unexpectedly, blends the density of classic shoegaze with the dark edge of doom metal. This, as you would expect, sets about crushing the audience in a very direct manner.
Welcome back to the Real Gone Singles Bar, the place where we explore some of the more interesting individual tracks that have landed in our inbox over the past few weeks. This time around, we bring you a fantastic number from a British alt-folk band, the return of some cosmic, psychy legends, a great piece of synth based material, some well crafted pop punk…and more. As always, we hope you find something new to enjoy!
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Whenever psychedelic and swinging London appears in documentary footage, there’s always a tendency to suggest, to those of later generations, that Joe Boyd’s short-lived UFO club was where everybody hung out. This is largely to do with an easily available and well circulated clip of Syd Barrett and The Pink Floyd hammering through ‘Astronomy Domine’ against a home made light show. The late 60s saw lots of other underground activity, not least of all at UFO’s successor, Middle Earth.
Between the release of The Beach Boys ‘Pet Sounds’ in May 1966 and the first Woodstock Festival in August 1969, the American rock and pop scenes went into overdrive. With the groundbreaking ‘God Only Knows’, Brian Wilson had shown how grand “pop” could be in the hands of a master; the birth of psychedelia meant that garage rock grew into something much bigger and more interesting than a selection bands churning out variants of ‘Louie Louie’, and the blues morphed into sprawling jams which birthed a generation of guitar heroes. A prolonged period of experimentation arguably reached its peak in 1968, with The Byrds releasing their last works with David Crosby (at least for a time), Moby Grape issuing a double LP (‘Wow/Grape Jam’), the arrival of Spirit’s debut (helmed by the fantastic ‘Fresh-Garbage’), The Velvet Underground’s ‘White Light/White Heat’ proving their Warhol overseen debut wasn’t just some arty fluke, and the Grateful Dead issuing their show piece ‘Dark Star’ as a single. Even Simon & Garfunkel got a little out there on their fourth LP ‘Bookends’, with their masterful folk-pop joined by the vaguely psychy ‘Punky’s Dilemma’, and feeling brave enough to include Art’s audio verité ‘Voices of Old People’ as a key album track.
The world isn’t short of great psych and prog themed anthologies. The fact is, if you’re a keen psych/freakbeat/early prog fan, you’ve probably got those Cherry Red sets bringing together a wealth of stuff from between 1967-69, the many ‘Rubble’ releases, and more besides. Why should you add another psych oriented release to your already solid collection of compilations? Simply that ‘Psych!: British Prog, Rock, Folk & Blues 1966-73’ brings together a wealth of great music in less of a scattershot manner. Its three disc, sixty four track selection celebrates the more “out there” releases from Decca Records and their Deram off-shoot, and in doing so, plays more like a journey through an ever changing landscape from a more focused perspective, showing how the label often found themselves at the forefront of one of history’s most exciting periods in music.