I am listening to rather esoteric, often private-pressed early 70s music at the moment, some of which I will review, and this Queens Village, New York ensemble is wonderfully weird. Indeed, as I type this, I am listening to their second album Weltschmerzen [1973] where the opening 8 minute track Memories - including Kennebec Chatter, The Fair, Dancehall Days and Others is silly-brilliant.
The School begins with three amazing tracks - often with young children joining in, or not, among the screams and random instrumentation - which are Super Music Man, Songbird of the South and Ballet for a Small Apartment, and the superb female vocal - probably Carla Lund from what I can find out - is on the first raw roaring rock; is on the second refined rock, and is on the third operatic rock. An astonishing range. Birds chirp on the second, by the way. The third is orchestral as it progresses with a range of off-beat [literally] percussion.
Fourth Waiting at the Theatre is quite a soulful number with fuzzed guitar; fifth Children's Anthem - Let Us Sing a Love Song begins with kids coughing in what sounds like a large auditorium [one assumes they are gathered in a large space, and there are echos] and it is then a rather upbeat, jolly, piano thumped and whistle tooted stereotypical kid's chorus song.
The rest is various acid folk, raw folk and psychedelic folk type ensemble offerings: quite raw and with an occasional tuba. Even vaudeville, or is that chamber orchestra?
Black Crow Country is quite rocky, and has crows cawing.
Great fun.
Along with Welzschmerzen, PVOC has left us works of strangely demented genius; perhaps they were not quite ready to record, but they did anyway, and their rough looseness gives their music a strange soul. This is both insider and outsider music simultaneously. I prefer "Welz" (I own both albums, and there's a third from 1979 I'm missing). As The Hombres sang back when, when listening to these folks, "Keep an open mind and let it all hang out."
ReplyDeleteYes, agreed, and this 'rawness' is so preferable to the highly orchestrated and digitally altered/massaged whatever of so much other music. This is uplifting in its freshness. Thank you for stopping by.
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