Hot diggity, this is really good! HEAVY organ presence from the early British progressive school - a little Mike Ratledge (Soft Machine) freakout here, thick comping in the dense Hugh Banton way (Van Der Graff Generator), high energy levels and rollicking sections with a pulse like Samurai.
He can sing really well, sounds like what Jimi wanted to sound. Don't get me wrong, I love his voice, but he was always disparaging it himself. In some places there are dreamy background vocals. What Chubby does vacillates from heart-wrenching rampage-fueled frenzies to heartfelt intoxications, often in the same song. At the very least, in every song, his voice is the perfect foil for fronting a tight forward-psychedelic outfit.
Anyway, you want this bad, it's sometimes like a cross between Hendrix, good Allman Brothers circa 'In Memory of Elizabeth Reed,' and something else I can't place - maybe because it amounts to about a dozen psych bands and at least as many progressive bands outside of the ones mentioned.
Nice West Coast acid guitar leads (I'm still trying to cipher the fuzz content), thumpy, rumbling bass, supportive and often appropriately bombastic drum kit. There are a couple of slower tunes, one of which ('He Died' - see) is a touch on the side of hypnotizing in the way that Paternoster is.
The last few cuts are on the heavy bluespsych angling vibe. Very wasted bludgeoning, enough for a soundtrack to smashing your head on the pavement and not feeling a thing. So rough and tumble that you could be eating glass and not notice, all the while thinking that the crunching is guitar and the bleeding is all inside your head. Butterfield Blues Band, eat your amps out. This is where the fuzz comes in, shaggy like an uncombed afro.
11 December 2005
FRANCO BATTIATO - Italy 1972
"Pollution" &"Fetus"
"Pollution" &"Fetus"
Like a woozy greco-roman art-deco sun-marine destroyer, "Pollution" is the revolution in sound abounding like a cantankerous cacophonic cloud surrounding the shrouding pale. Franco Battiato's first two masterfully pieced-together reliefs give more respite and resolve than any reconstituted weed or leaf between your gritting teeth. This is and was evermore shall beast. It beat and bleat and breathe avant-garde idiomatically auto-didactically entrenched inestimably on electronic stifled sullen proclamation. In rough-hewn dedication to breaking fashions and hodge-podging his own meshed sonic clothing exterior marked refuting to be sparked by nothing less than cyan matter not no god art alive, striving writhing googolplex cortex brain matter splatter jumble yaya across the plains rebuffing sage and subtly sprayed with the age of 'future we upon us,' this classic from the early year of 1972 and paired up toddy-boo with it's predecessor "Fetus" stressing and genuflecting before this newly constructed shrine spine supper sublime. These are two distinct and spectacularly brilliant albums shining brightly to the foreground of the mind's eye imagination-speak. It is simply no wonder that they are still aeons ahead of their time. He and those works are a haze pathogen to the very core and crux of the creative lifeforce itself - nevermores and wheretofores will undoubtedly not be able to be refracted sharply enough from the stuff of alien threshing heaving the chest, rings the navigation incessant, blessing the present most pleasant.
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