Monday 16 December 2013

Fifty Foot Hose - Cauldron



Melting Pot Sounds

The album opens to a faint pulsing sound that increases in volume to an unknown drone, and then track two If Not This Time introduces a repeated/echoed female vocal, electronic noises and jangled guitar riffs riding bass walks to further dissonant effects, and track three Opus 777 returns to 22 seconds of random drone  and ascending individual tones. 


From here, the next eight tracks mix the ordinary with the extraordinary – folk songs and synth effects – to make this 1967 psychedelic experiment a template for the musical explorations to follow in San Francisco and beyond. Sixth track Red The Sign Post plays with fuzz too, and whilst the songs overall are hardly memorable [in the way Jefferson Airplane, for example, would truly psychedelicise, or the United States of America would be more cleverly playful] they are pushing rock boundaries, title track Cauldron being the most adventurous with its distortions of voice, background screams, poetic recitals, reversed sounds and other assorted noises.

No comments:

Post a Comment