Compilation of psychedelic favorites (1966 - 1971)

Looking for the good material from the psychedelic era is a lot like being poor in India, digging through piles and piles of cow faeces to find that single, undigested corn of rice. For you who don't like the smell of crap, just see this as a bag of rice.

http://rapidshare.com/files/208919409/Golden_Apples_pt1.rar.html
http://rapidshare.com/files/208919411/Golden_Apples_pt2.zip.html


Tracklist:

Count Five - Psychotic Reaction (1966)
The Electric Prunes - I had too mutch to dream last night (1966)
Sagittarius - My World Fell Down (1967)
Living Daylights - Lets live for today (1967)
The Fairytale - Lovely People (1967)
Blues Magoos - Tobacco Road (1967)
Mark Wirtz - Here's our dear old weatherman (1967)
The Smoke - My Friend Jack (1967)
Californians - Golden Apples (1967)
The Marmalade - I See The Rain (1967)
See My Love - Gentle Soul (1968)
Staccatos - Butchers And Bakers (1968)
Spencer Davis- After tea (1968)
The Status Quo - Pictures Of Matchstick Men (1968)
John's Children - A Midsummer's Night Scene (1968)
Ramases And Selket -Mind's Eye (1968)
Timebox - Gone Is The Sad Man (1968)
Fox - Hey Mr Carpenter (1968)
Turquoise - Woodstock (1969)
The French Revolution - Shoo-Doo-Bee-Do (1969)
Kevin Ayers - Girl On A Swing (1969)
Argosy - Imagine (1969)
We All Together - It's A Sin To Go Away (1970)
Time Machine - Turn Back Time _ Bird In The Wind (1971)

The total running time is 1:18:29, musical styles included are garage rock with a psychedelic touch, psychedelic rock, freakbeat and psychedelic/bubblegum/baroque pop, enjoy!

1: Running Wild – Under Jolly Roger

Length: 04:44
Year: 1987
Appearance: Under Jolly Roger
http://rapidshare.com/files/168648968/Running_Wild_-_Under_Jolly_Roger.mp3.html

This is the song I most frequently return to and is most effected by. But why? It’s just a very basic, traditional, fast paced, loud and straight-forward metal song, that’s why. And out of all of them this is the one that might as well could have been created in a laboratory to combine the types of riffs, the type of guitar sound, the type of soloing, the types of pace, the types of rhythm, the type of vocals, everything that I like best in music. It’s just catchy and powerful like hell, put it on replay for a day and it’s still fun listening to. This song even got a boost in the ‘’20 Years in History’’ compilation with a madly bombardic sound mix, that would maybe ruin many other songs but suits this one perfectly.

2: Yes – Starship Trooper

Length: 09:25
Year: 1971 (recorded 1970)
Appearance: The Yes Album
http://rapidshare.com/files/168648969/03_-_Starship_Trooper.mp3.html

Starship Trooper was one of those rare examples of songs exceeding six minutes that even the most square, mr. mainstream, three-minute-meanie pop radio stations couldn’t resist playing in it’s entirety, and it’s easy to understand. The piece has a similar feeling to that which I expressed towards the Granpa film of childhood magic, only that (besides being in the context of progressive rock of course) this is taken to a much more emotional level and just explodes with summery joy. The song is separated into three parts, "Life Seeker", "Disillusion" and "Würm", Würm by far being the most noted part of the song as a cosmic, dreamy buildup. To quote wikipedia ‘’The Würm part of "Starship Trooper" is a continuous cadenza of chords (|G-Eb|C|) played by ensemble and repeated adlib: first accompaniment: electric guitar on the right stereo channel, then acoustic guitar, bass pedals, and drums from middle channel, then organ and bass guitar with vibrato and distortion from left channel, then starts the guitar solo, that swaps from side to side.’’. However, it’s largely being in the context of coming after the blissful melodic parts that makes it so great, having you in just the right state of mind when it begins.

Even if the buildup to the guitar solo at the end is the central part of Würm and probably the highlight, the actual guitar solo feels too short barely going over the one minute mark. It’s almost like Yes interrupts with a silent ad saying ‘’if you want to hear more, go see us live, there is an open spot for jamming’’. And true, at least this void is usually filled with around three minutes more of guitars and synthesizers going nuts, like this 13:06 one from Keys to Ascension http://rapidshare.com/files/168648971/02_-_Starship_Trooper.mp3.html, but none of the live performances manage to get the same clean, gentle, delicate qualities of the album version in the song as whole.

3: Bad Brains – I Against I

Length: 02:50
Year: 1986
Appearance: I Against I
http://rapidshare.com/files/168648966/02_I_Against_I.mp3.html

Bad Brains is the band which the entire punk movement should have sounded like with their maniac, spontaneous musical playfulness. The greatness in this particular song lies much in the unusually awesome metallic riffing, which probably wouldn’t have sounded as awesome in more traditionally fast hardcore pace like it does now in a more laid back yet still energetic pace which gives just the right mix of ‘fat’ and speed. To quote an amazon reviewer ‘’this album was a MAJOR disappointment! the hardcore tempo that swept the listener through RFL is *gone*, replaced by a standard sludgy metal boom-boom-boom’’. What stands out most though is H.R’s possessed vocals where he pulls off singing with about five different voices, all of them squeezing out well written lyrics.

4: Mahavishnu Orchestra – Birds Of Fire

Length: 05:47
Year: 1972
Appearance: Birds Of Fire
http://rapidshare.com/files/168648965/01_Birds_Of_Fire.m4a.html

Could be seen as a remake of Mahavishnu’s first track on their first album, Meeting Of The Spirits http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQG7XpCiSVA , but Birds Of Fire are a few straws sharper. It alone includes hypnotic layers, textures, and complexities that were hardly (if ever) heard previously, and certainly not very often today. For a jazz fusion band the main riff is repeated quite a lot, but that’s only for the better. It’s heavy and addictive in that intriguing way only atonality and maybe needles can achieve.

5: Summoning – Farewell

Year: 2001
Length: 09:19
Appearance: Let Mortal Heroes Sing Your Fame
http://rapidshare.com/files/168648964/08-faremell.mp3.html

Imagine the wicked witch of the west choking on semen blasting out a Nazi Germany anthem on a low-fi radio in a church and you’ve got Summonings magnum opus.

Your head might explode, but it’s worth it.

6: Godspeed You! Black emperor – Storm

Length: 22:32
Year: 2000
Appearance: Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven
http://rapidshare.com/files/168648963/01_-_Storm.mp3.html






A post-rock song with symphonic qualities, separated into four movements.
1. Lift Yr. Skinny Fists, Like Antennas to Heaven... (Lasting until 06:15)
2. Gathering Storm/Il Pleut à Mourir [+Clatters Like Worry] (Lasting until 17:25)
3. "'Welcome to Barco [sic] AM/PM...' [L.A.X 5/14/00]" (Lasting until 18:40)
4. "Cancer Towers on Holy Road Hi-Way" (Lasting until 22:32)

The song starts out in a mood of melancholic comfortableness accompanied by soothing string and horn instruments of various kinds. Slowly, things start to build with layers after layers of instrumentation together with a more and more uplifting atmosphere. At the best moments of the song it’s like soaring in the air with these mighty walls of sound, awaiting a violent explosion. But the explosion remains absent, and the song instead drones away for a lengthy amount of time, but it just feels natural. What doesn’t sound as natural are the second and forth movements: The third movement is just a random recording, and the fourth just random recordings with a piano, both of these which feels entirely separated from the song and should be so. But after all, despite the greatness of this band, Godspeed is still stuck in the post-rock status quo so these types of quirky pretensions which adds nothing to the music is just something you’ll have to learn to accept, like it or not. Most definitely not.

7: Howard Blake – Tiny As A Flower

Length: 00:53
Year: 1989
Appearance: Granpa
http://rapidshare.com/files/168648960/Granpa_-_Tiny_As_A_Flower.mp3.html

Howard Blake is mostly known for writing and composing Walking in the Air for the 1982 animated short The Snowman. Probably as a result of it’s success, his music played a much more central part in the animated short ‘Granpa’ which is like a 26 minute mini-opera. I love how these genial little melodies that could might as well have been stretched and filled out for several minutes just sweeps by in mostly less than a minute, and it goes on like this for the entire film. All material is of pretty equally amazing quality, but the very first song captures the pretty, exploring, magical, naïve yet melancholic atmosphere the entire film centers around best of them all.

Music is preformed by Sinfonia of London and Wroughton Middle School Choir.

8: Pecture of Primitive Hunting

Length: 07:12
Year: 580
Appearance: This version's from Chinese Classical Music (6 CD Box set)

http://rapidshare.com/files/167756485/11_Pecture_of_Primitive_Hunting__Bone-whistle_and_Orchestra_.mp3.html

It’s like, this almost 1500 year old experimental impressionist track, I have yet to hear anything else from this era of Chinese classical music that sounds like it. It includes a whole orchestra of various Chinese instruments, and during its course it keeps switching from slow ambient drones, a group people yelling madly, rhythmically advanced fast paced sections, switches from very low sound frequency to very high sound frequency and much more. At the center of it all is a high-pitched bone-flute resembling the sound of a bird, chirping together with various howling wind instruments and ‘’background effects’’. That is if you can call them background effects, they're as important to the composition as the main instruments, just as the silence is as important as the sound.

9: Slint – Nosferatu Man

Length: 05:35
Year: 1991 (recorded 1990)
Appearance: Spiderland
http://rapidshare.com/files/167737650/Slint_-_Nosferatu_Man.mp3.html

Spiderland is one of those albums where it’s a bit shameful to pick a track out of context. Played in its entirety its a lot like having a 40 minute nightmare (a nightmare with ghostly angular guitar rhythms, ghoulish dramatically alternating dynamic shifts and spooky irregular time signatures, boo!). On one hand there is no real standout track from this album since it’s so consistently good, on the other that would be Nosferatu Man. While being as pitch-black as the entire album it’s so in a slightly different way: The album mostly has the character of lying on your bed for weeks out of depression wanting to commit suicide while Nosferatu Man gives you the feeling of being trapped in a spider web with a giant, hairy spider slowly, slowly reaching towards you, eventually starting to eat your head. The guitar chorus is almost thrash like, the verses high-pitched dissonant riff scars your ears, Brian McMahans vocals are sincere and frustrated by depression and the low baselines dwelling way down in the bottom ties it all together in a dark aura.

10: Cacophony – The Ninja

Length: 07:24
Year: 1987
Appearance: Speed Metal Symphony
http://rapidshare.com/files/167737649/Cacophony_-_The_Ninja.mp3.html

Despite the awesome chorus and verses its easy to hear that its soloing the two at the time young guitarists (Marty Friedman and Jason Becker, Jason only being 17 here) are passionate about rather than sing along parts, like in all neo-classical metal. The greatest part is the intro lasting until 01:40, which is almost tear shredding (what the heck, pun intended). Would make the best background music ever for a dramatic 80’s anime scene.