Various Artists
Now Again Records
(2009)

Damon – Don’t You Feel Me

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The late sixties and seventies marked the beginning of a new kind of blues. Vietnam veterans reeling from Khe Sanh and Danang, young Americans recovering from acid nightmares and brutal demonstrations. The years between 1968 and 1974 turned out to be rough, and the whole world seemed to be dealing with despots and cultural revolutions of one kind or another. Out of that period of time came some wonderfully moody music that invokes the global head trip — fuzz guitars, distorted sounds, heavy drums and dark melodies. Jimi Hendrix, Cream, James Brown and Fela Kuti are some of the major archetypes of Egon Alapatt’s compilation of psychedelic ballads and dirges. Spanning several genres and sounds, musicians from places as disparate as Colombia, Nigeria, Sweden, South Korea and Thailand are represented. Despite geographical distances, all the music share a gloomy and fuzzed-out sensibility, the psychedelic blues.

Some of the tracks here have an unpolished, amateurish quality that sounds immediately affecting, like Ofege’s “It’s Not Easy.” The band of high school students from Lagos combine wailing vocals and fuzz guitars to recall early Cream with a Nigerian bent. Top Drawer’s “Song of a Sinner” pairs a powerful and sample-ready vamp with mournful lyrics. The gospel funk of the Sensational Saints takes a farfisa organ and rhythm section to produce a powerfully affecting sound. Praises to God notwithstanding, “Black power, throughout the universe, displayed” is uplifting on many levels — spirituality for a new age and sound. Title track “Forge Your Own Chains” by D.R. Hooker combines soothing lounge jazz improvisations with hard rock structures, while South Korean Shin Jung Hyun, the “godfather of Korean rock,” sings somberly against a melancholic backdrop of guitar and drums that were considered incendiary by the Park Chung-hee dictatorship.

T. Zchiew and The Johnny’s “Let Your Life Be Free” comes from Thailand’s seventies music scene. The lyrics, which plead for liberation, reflect the student rebellions against the Thanom-Praphas dictatorship during the time. Damon’s “Don’t  You Feel Me” bridge Los Angeles and the Mediterranean with tranced-out Turkish psych rock while Sweden’s Baby Grandmothers, progenitors to Dungen, perform the loud and expansive Hendrix-influenced “Somebody Keeps Calling My Name,” which sounds capable of igniting the instruments and speakers in a torrent of guitar-driven madness.

With plenty of great loops and beats for producers, much of the music here is from outrageously hard-to-find and expensive records that are now out of print. While beat junkies may find much to like about the particular style of sound, others may find the music equally interesting for its subversive role in the cultural revolutions of each country. Kourosh Yaghmaei, featured in ““Hajm-e Khaali,” is one of Iran’s first rock musicians, although due to matters of cultural orthodoxy, he has since departed from westernized forms of music and has focused on traditional sounds. In the compilation, you get to hear a virtuosic musician at work on material that’s uninhibited and liberated. A lot of the songs here carry that sense of immediacy, as if playing this music mattered to them on a wholly emotional ands psychological level. While the sixties and seventies may have passed, there are those of us who still share the same nightmares, the Fearful Trip carried on to tomorrow.

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For more info, visit Stones Throw Records.

via Abe Ahn, 22 November 2009 12:18am | 1 |