Words cannot express quite how much I love this album, which is a bit of a pain as I have to write about 600 of them. Suffice to say in a week of bird-flu, climate change and the first ever blonde Bond, just thinking about this record has me jumping around, grinning like a lunatic.
Artist Pete Fowler, best known for his sleeve designs for the Super Furry Animals and Magic Numbers, has compiled this album. It’s meant as a soundtrack for Monsterism Island – the imaginary world that the characters in his paintings inhabit. If you’ve ever seen any of Fowler’s work, then I’m sure you can appreciate just how bizarre a prospect this is...
This is the perfect introduction to some of the more obscure areas of sixties and seventies music. From psychedelic folk to kitsch exotica and some early electronic music, it’s all here. These are the bands that have been left out of the rock canon for not quite looking the part, for being just that bit too weird, or as with Mandingo, for not actually existing.
There are far too many great songs on here to go into all of them, but highlights include Martin Denny’s plinky-plonky Sake Rock. Denny’s a recurring presence on the album and with good reason – the man had a talent for warping cheesy lounge sounds into something far more interesting and strange. Denny died earlier this year at the age of 93 following a hugely successful career, four million records sold and a renewal of interest in his work.
Equally wonderful is The Garden of Earthly Delights by The United States of America. Singer Dorothy Moskowitz’s spits her vocals over a furious synth and guitar backing. The USA, though again fairly obscure, have been an important influence on a lot of contemporary artists such as Broadcast and Portishead. Their one album (the band soon dissolved into squabbling and broken friendships) is great and I plan to look at them in greater detail in a future column.
Love Without Sound by The White Noise is an impressively dense sound collage of a woman’s voice and creaking electronics. Pretty much what you’d expect from a band that included Delia Derbyshire, one of the people responsible for the original child-scaring Doctor Who theme. Program by Silver Apples is equally innovative. This is a band that used sampling techniques years before the term was invented. Program has a lovely folk melody running through it, but it’s the beat and snatches of discordant orchestral music that makes the song so unusual.
It’s not just psychedelia and electronic music here though. There’s blues too, in the form of Clarence ‘Frogman’ Henry; fuzz rock from Dead Meadow (one of the few modern bands on the album), and a bizarre funk pastiche in Mandingo’s Black Rite. Mandingo didn’t actually exist. Their records were recorded by a roster of various session musicians hired by EMI in an attempt to cash in on the seventies fad for all things African. Despite that, it’s actually a pretty good tune.
Many of the songs here have never been released on CD before, so the decision to mix some of them together is a little annoying. But that’s a minor complaint when presented with such a variety of great music. Sounds of Monsterism Island is a glorious ray of summer sunshine in the middle of autumn. It’s one of the freshest and most exciting records I’ve heard all year, which, given that most of it was recorded forty years ago is a little bit worrying. But no matter; this is mellow, mental genius that every single one of you should buy immediately. If you thought that psychedelia stopped with Sgt Pepper, you’re in for a surprise.