Music Review: Various Artists, Shapes & Shadows

By Jeffery X Martin

The psychedelic era, short-lived as it was, produced some of the most memorable tunes of the late Sixties and early Seventies. It also spewed forth a lot of crap. Basically, if you had a flange or wah-wah pedal on your cheap electric guitar, and some decent harmonies from the bassist and keyboard player, you could churn out a great psychedelic song in about half an hour. The lyrics didn’t have to make sense. As long as you were blowing someone’s mind, or singing about blowing someone’s mind, you were set.

Quality psychedelic music, as seen backwards through the beer goggles of time, is hard to find. Some of the good stuff, largely unheard in the States, can be find on the Cherry Red/Grapefruit compilation album, Shapes & Shadows: Psychedelic Pop and Other Rare Flavours from the Chapter One Vaults 1968 – 1972.

The Chapter One label, started by songwriter Les Reed in 1968, was the home for many psychedelic bands, and a lot of the tracks on this album have been highly-sought by collectors of music from that era. To be sure, there are some standout tracks available here.

Then again, a lot of it sounds like The Monkees.

Putney Bridge’s song, “What’s It All About?” leads off the album, and it may be the biggest earworm on the whole set. It’s a catchy, jangly tune, with a main riff cribbed almost directly from “Pleasant Valley Sunday.” But, it is difficult to get that chorus out of your head once it slides in there.

Compleatists can also find “Mozart vs. The Rest,” a fast-paced electric guitar-based take on classical music from the band Episode Six. This is the band that both Roger Glover and Ian Gillan left in order to join Deep Purple, filling out that band’s most successful line-up. The song is fun, reminiscent of and predating Extreme’s hit, “Play with Me.”

Also interesting is The Californian’s over-the-top cover of “You’ve Got Your Troubles,” a 1965 hit by the Fortunes and “The Race,” by Christopher, which features some of the creepiest flute playing this side of Jethro Tull.

The rest of the album blurs together in a cacophony of arpeggios and guitar wankery, the kind of music that helped kill the entire psychedelic movement to begin with. While aficionados of psychedelic music will no doubt find much to rejoice over in this compilation, casual fans may be left a bit overwhelmed and, eventually, bored.

Let’s leave this one to the mavens, and the rest of us can listen through once or twice and be satisfied. It’s a fun curiosity, but no more than that.

Shapes & Shadows: Psychedelic Pop and Other Rare Flavours from the Chapter One Vaults 1968 – 1972 was released by Cherry Red Records on September 22.