JOHN BERBERIAN & THE ROCK EAST ENSEMBLE
Middle Eastern Rock
Rev-Ola CD
www.revola.co.uk
Listening to this 1969 Verve Forecast session in the immediate afterglow of Barack Hussein Obama’s historic election victory, one can but hope that the new US president can reconcile and unite across the great divides half as well as John Berberian managed to on this heavyweight opus.
Don’t be put off by the kitsch name or the mondo packaging with its whiff of exotic Arab-sploitation, for this is truly the real deal. Berberian was born and bred in New York, but is of Armenian extraction. A master of the oud, the fretless, pear-shaped Middle-Eastern stringed instrument, he here lets rip on seven tracks of deep improvised jazz-rooted free-flowing freak-outs! With Joe Beck on guitar, trading licks and providing ballast, this lies roughly halfway between the deeply ethnocentric world jazz of Ahmed Abdul-Malik and the acid-tinged journeying of early Pat Martino, midway between the Kasbah and the lava lamp, and remains vital and mesmeric to this day!
Hugh Dellar
LES BLOUSONS NOIRS
1961-1962
Born Bad CD
www.myspace/bornbadrecords
This combo played French garage punk before it was officially invented. Nobody told these boys that French ’60s pop should be polite and restrained. As the liner notes point out, the sound is so primitive it sounds like they bought their instruments in the morning and recorded in the afternoon. Info about the band is limited to their first names, deduced from a sleeve autographed for a fan.
Both the band’s EPs are included, (the budget was so small they used the same photo for both covers, with a different colour background!) and both feature cardboard-sounding drums, sloppy guitars, raw vocals (mostly in French) and crappy production. Les Blousons Noirs have much in common with the minimalist mayhem of such mid-60s luminaries as Los Saicos and The Shaggs, who they pre-date by several years. Depending on your mood, such primal sounds can be excruciating or, (like the four covers from the Special Rock EP), the very essence of rock’n’roll.
Phil Suggitt
THE JACKS
Vacant World
Erebus CD
There are certain things that remind us what poor and paltry things words are. One is trying to describe an individual face so that another person can draw it with any degree of precision. Another is attempting to convey the parallel musical universe from which Vacant World emerged in two paragraphs!
Utterly unlike anything else that came out of the Group Sound era, The Jacks – a folk trio with a jazz drummer – owe few audible debts. In places, there are echoes of the kind of bleak, blank, chaotic canvases The Outsiders were painting on CQ whilst at others they hit like a half-speed underwater Velvet Underground, but everything is suffused with a sense of twilight, of dislocation and despair, of angst incarnate. Nihilist ambient doom folk – alleviated with gorgeous smoky flute lines and occasionally fracturing into fuzz-laden screaming, Vacant World is the sound of every winter evening crashing in on you forever. That good!
Hugh Dellar
EMMANUELLE PARRENIN
Maison Rouge
Lion CD
ARMANDO PIAZZA
Su‡n
SANDHY & MANDHY
Para Castukis
Both Missing Vinyl LPs
Emmanuelle Parrenin’s Maison Rouge exudes a strangely beguiling beauty, being, as it is, a bouillabaisse of the avant-garde, the ambient, the traditional, the crystalline and the ethereal. Imagine a merging of Carol Kleyn, Brigitte Fontaine and Vashti Bunyan, whilst the winds of punk howl outside, and you’re halfway there already.
Armando Piazza’s Su‡n is a dark, lush, sombre set reminiscent in places of Caetano Veloso’s work from the same period. Side A is eerie, muted subtle psychedelia with some incredible fuzz bass work courtesy of Shawn Phillips, whilst the flip is more ornate and acoustic. Lovely, lovely stuff.
If moody, languorous, minor-chord Farfisa-driven beat is your bag then you could do far worse than invest in Lion Productions’ wonderful job re-press of Sandhy & Mandhy’s impossibly rare Para Castukis. Rather too mannered overall for me, though they do break out the fuzz and freak slightly here and there.
Hugh Dellar
THE SEA-DERS
The Sea-ders
Groovie LP
www.groovierecords.com
I’ve raved about their 1966 oriental delight ‘Thanks A Lot’ before in Shindig! as it was included on last year’s fabulous Waking Up Scheherazade comp, but if you’ve still not been seduced by its Eastern charm then you are surely missing out on some very evocative beat sounds of the early psychedelic era. Same goes for the less frantic sing-a-long style of ‘Undecidedly’.
Fortunately for us The Sea-ders went beyond the confines of their Lebanon homeland, where ‘Thanks A Lot’ had already topped the pop charts, and travelled overseas to London, where Decca granted them an initial single and EP release. The spelling of the group’s name was switched to The Cedars in ’68 and a further two singles appeared to little fanfare.
Subsequent generations would be rewarded with choice Sea-ders and Cedars fare if they acquired various compilation sets; Rubble 16 and Exploiting Plastic Inevitable Lesson 1 among them. The urgent speed-rhythms and winning harmonies of The Hollies come to mind at times, as do varying degrees of Revolver-like tones. A dusting of pre-Tomorrow-esque sparkle, heard to great effect on ‘For Your Information’ and its counterpart ‘Hide If You Want To Hide’, is also part and parcel of the group’s indomitable charm.
I’d been led to believe too that EP tracks ‘Better Loved’ and ‘Cause I Do Care’ were inferior. On the contrary, however, these are both real nice efforts, with a particular folk-beat emphasis, one that I assure you does nothing but enhance their strong, if somewhat scant recorded legacy.
Lenny Helsing
VARIOUS ARTSISTS
Andergraun Vibrations #3
Hundergrum Records LP
Hundergrum@mixmail.com
This overdue third volume in the ongoing series of Spanish underground sounds spans the period 1967 to ’75. It is every bit as wonderful as its illustrious predecessors. This time round there’s a great garage and garage/psych vibe to a lot of the songs.
Take The Matches’ ‘Little Boy’. The lyric is little more than the repetition of “when I was a little boy, I had some loving girls” over an insistent groovy beat with bendy guitar parts but its simplicity makes it an instant charmer.
There are 13 great tracks here over 40 minutes that culminate in Jordi Soler’s ‘Ha Ha Gent’, a great Hendrixian psych axe sound alike. There are extensive and well-researched liner notes on all the marginal artists featured in both Spanish and English.
This is a fabulous package and much respect must go to its compilers. Limited to 750 copies, approach your switched on E-tailer post haste.
Paul Martin
VARIOUS ARTISTS
Cazumbi: African Sixties Garage #1
No Smoke LP
“Africa is unfruitful and dry” is the opening statement before The A-Cads launch into a stinging ‘Down The Road’ to disprove it. “Cazumbi” apparently means spirit from another world. It is an appropriate title for these 20 great tracks from South Africa, Mozambique, Angola and Congo. What becomes apparent is how untapped Africa’s ’60s musical output still is.
A good number of places adopted Western garage and beat, giving them a distinctive African flavour. The insert gives background to the emergent beat scenes in the colonies. The band shots show both exclusively black African and multi-ethnic groups, as colonials hooked up with indigenous musicians.
Mozambique’s Impacto’s ‘Knock On Wood’ redefines the funky soul number as a deliciously yet barely held together garage exertion whilst Angola’s Gambuzinos provide a highlight with their beautiful ‘Aida’. Overall, the collection comes across like an African equivalent of the Pre-Kraut Pandemonium series. Get it while you can and happy exploring!
Paul Martin
VARIOUS ARTISTS
Wizzz #2
Born Bad LP/CD
www.myspace.com/bornbadrecords
Two or three years after the first volume and with a change of record label, comes a second crop of what the French did best musically in the later ’60s, studio based pop. If you liked #1, here’s more of the same but even more so!
Controlled fuzz tone guitars blended with string sections, plectrum clicking bass lines and breathy Gaelic lyrics! As with #1, the LP version comes with a chunky CD sized booklet, although it’s all in French only and unlike the first, there doesn’t seem to be an on-line English translation (as yet). The pictures are cool though!
Bouncy pop and bendy production values abound and if you have yet to discover the likes of Bruno Leys, Chorus Reverendus, Zorgonnes, San Antonio, Nelly Perrier or Jesus (!) then you are in for a treat.
Paul Martin |
