Oar

4/10

Just like with Syd Barrett, for someone suffering with schizophrenia or whatever, I expected the music to sound really out-there and wild. But this is just regular ass Psych Pop. Nothing to see here.

I mean just straight up was not a fan. Like no redeeming parts to this for me. I didn't actively hate it, but definitely didn't enjoy any of it. 2 at most?

Bleak.

So depressing in places, I considered taking a bath with the toaster. Then there was the occasional bit that wasn't so bad. There was no flow, no direction and no enjoyment to be had. Weird fucking album. Not 1001-worthy in the slightest.

Sorry but I found this so boring

I'm a fan of psychedelic rock and singer songwriters, but save for a few good moments here I'm not convinced the two go together.

When I’m not in the right mood this type of music is infuriating. And I’m rarely in the right mood, so there you go. (ntm.)

Can understand why this album was admired by indie and alternative artists but I won't be listening to this one again. Little Hands and War In Peace decent

It was nice to revisit this album with a more analytical mindset. When I first heard it over 10 years ago I didn't have patience or interest to spend the hour digesting it all. "Oar" is pretty weird at it's surface but upon further exploration this listener found that specific 1969 "early Floyd" sound that he loves so much. In his solo performance 'Skip' is able to create something much more authentic than what was presented in Moby Grape. The deep hollow voice mixed with cheap acoustic strings creates this warm psychedelic Americana sound that appeared for such a brief moment in time within the exploding 60s. Light drums and soft bass keeps the tempo as a man experiencing constant unwelcome psychic change shares his words. "Diana" and "Weighted Down (The Prison Song)" were favorites this time around. 4.5

I appreciate and sympathise with what this record was going for. The background info is pretty harrowing, and I'm made a little uncomfortable by all the tongue-in-cheek sanist jokes scattered throughout some of these reviews. That being said, this is not something I'll be returning to often. The instruments and lo-fi ambience were nice, but the album itself is quite bloated and meandering.

Interesting story about the album, but not an interesting album Standout song Little Hands

Good voice. Nice mix concidering its only ment as demo's. Later half of the album iss less compelling for sure.

Quite possibly the most depressed album I’ve ever heard.

OK

This album can get fucked.

A lot of rambling single artist 60s music, it's chaotic unorganized garbage. Boring at times, unpleasant at others, this album is just a chaotic and unpleasant throughout. Boooooo

It seems like everyone in the 60's felt the need to make a crappy folk rock album, and this artist added a little spice to his by being a crazy guy. What a visionary! There's truly nothing of musical significance about this album, but it's great that Skip played all of the instruments so the listener gets a taste of how much he sucks in all realms of music making beyond singing and song writing.

Interesting story about this one. Shame that the music is by and large pretty dull.

I thought this might be OK but then I got past the first track 🤦🏻‍♂️ What on earth is this doing on the list?

Tedious AND self-indulgent? My favorite!

Pretty good sure

Time travel stuff here, sounds like the aughts, had no idea.

Day 63 Literally unlistenable. Will listen again Fav track: Diana

It was a bit of a strange one. Various styles. There was something a Syd Barrett feel to a couple of tracks. I heard strains of The Incredible String Band all mixed in there as well. The guitar had me hearing strains of Ocer the hills and far away by Zeppelin. I enjoyed it very much. I dont think it should be on the list though.

This album is like the textbook definition of an "album you should hear before you die." Songs written while in a hospital by a dude who went crazy and tried to kill his band mates with an ax. Not to mention that it was not promoted and the the record company deleted it from their catalog. The whole time I was listening to it I couldn't help but think I was doing something wrong. The funny part is that the digital album has all this material not released on the original release so at some point they clearly embraced this album. Unfortunately, I found the songs on this album to be lack luster when compared to the back story of the album its self. Not bad, but not memorable in any way. I am glad I looked up where the original release ended so I didn't have to listen to over an hour of demo quality music. 2/5

This was terrible. I hung in there as long as I could, but it was tough. As far as I can tell the only thing Skip has going for him is a likeable last name :)

This was an album made by a 22 year old, while he looks like a 42 year old, and sang like an 82 year old. Nothing redeemable about this. No more grandpa rock, please and thank you.

I expecting something a little less boring from a guy who attacked his bandmates with a fire axe. This man's Wiki page reads like a bad Tarantino movie: "Skippy was just hanging around. He hadn't been all there for years, because he'd been into heroin all that time. In fact he actually OD'ed once and they had him in the morgue in San Jose with a tag on his toe. All of a sudden he got up and asked for a glass of water. Now he was snortin' big clumps of coke, and nothing would happen to him. We couldn't have him around because he'd be pacing the room, describing axe murders. So we got him a little place of his own. He had a little white rat named Oswald that would snort coke too." How can someone whose rat snorts cocaine write music this dull?

Snooze. I wasn’t mortally offended by it so not sure but I also got so tired of listening so fast.

הרוב טוב. מקורי ואותנטי. היה לי קצת ארוך

alright

I’d never heard of Alexander “Skip” Spence or Oar before today. After a little research, I discovered that he had been a member of Jefferson Airplane, a band this challenge introduced me to and that I’ve really enjoyed, so that gave me some hope going into this. Unfortunately, it never really happened for me. There were moments where I thought the album was finally going to kick into gear and become something interesting, but it never quite got there. Overall, I found it long, boring and at times different simply for the sake of being different. I saw Oar described as “one of the most harrowing documents of pain and confusion ever made.” I’m guessing they meant for the listener! There are ideas in here that feel like they could turn into decent songs, but too often they just drift along without really going anywhere. I appreciate that the album is very personal and clearly comes from a difficult place, but that doesn’t necessarily make it enjoyable to listen to. For me, it was more exhausting than interesting. Favourite track: I guess “Little Hands” was quite a nice song and probably the highlight. Least favourite tracks: There’s some real crap on here. “Grey/Afro” and “Keep Everything Under Your Hat” were particularly hard work. Album artwork: Odd album cover. Not entirely sure what to make of it, which probably sums up the album quite well.

Navel gazing 60s slop disguised as e enlightening.

Horrible country music

This shit was hardly music. Some songs were almost interesting, like You Know, but those were like pieces of corn in excrement.

woah, listening to this feels like what's left when you suck all air and all tension out of a country album. it's not as horrible as i've expected it to be halfway through. but definitely an experience i don't want to relive.

I guess it’s not terrible. Reviews of it make it sound like it’s trying to do something interesting- successfully or not. I don’t hear that. I hear someone trying to be the next Gordon Lightfoot or Phil Oakes and failing. It’s just boring.

Maddening and frustrating. The first song seems ok -- kinds like this. Hmm. By the third song, it's -- How much wobbly guitar playing and incompetent singing are we supposed to sit through? Plus, bleeping stupid "word play" in the lyrics. Gaaaahhhh. Books of Moses -- hey, that one is actually pretty good. But Lawrence of Euphoria is inexcusable. (Clocks in at only 1:31? As Kumail Nanjani said to John Oliver in that HBO promo years ago, It feels longer.) Grey/Afro is a game changer. That is actually good. Remarkable. Really, really good. Except ... I thought this was going to end two minutes ago. What's happening? 9:38 ?!?!?! Good Lord. Then it feels absolutely interminable because is rolls right into This Time He Has Come, which I thought was still the same song, and so adding another 4:42 ... it's like a 14 minute suite. Holy something or other. Too Much !!!! I didn't understand why this is so long, but now I'm looking at the Wikipedia page, and I'm well into the bonus tracks. So, that's on me at this point. The real mystery is how it has maintained this mystique over the years. It seems like you have two factors that may be active here: the legend around the recording -- people just love a magnum opus delivered from the farther shore, delivered from beyond the limits of sanity (see: persistent efforts to believe Syd Barrett did something revelatory after he was dropped from Pink Floyd). And then we could place this album among a modest but substantial group of recordings in which artists discover possibilities -- DIY, raw / simplified, radically beyond questions of technical excellence ... etc. There are things that inspire artists by suggesting new possibilities, by departing so thoroughly from the surrounding contemporary landscape. This is a different question from, Is this a good album that one enjoys listening to? Anyway ... always good to learn of a fresh historical curiosity, but ... I dunno. This feels like a practical joke played on its audience by The Book. 2.5 stars

this album made absolutely no sense to me.

I'm truly perplexed how to rate this album numerically. I gathered from the group chat that everyone hated this. But I was intrigued by it. And I guess I'd rather be intrigued than bored (sorry Fleetwood Mac/Byrds). I find this whole album super weird and I completely understand why Beck and Jeff Tweedy and others are fascinated by it and decided to cover the songs. Of course the 1001 community mostly hated this which is understandable. One memorable review pointed out that if a woman had recorded this (especially in 1969) it could never have been released. True. The production seems insane--it literally sounds like a demo tape recorded in a motel bathroom. And yet... I was kind of taken by the first song. It was so weird and I found it hard to stop listening to it and the whole rest of the record. I don't know that I liked this album and I don't think I ever want to listen to it again in its entirety. But I will definitely seek out the Beck-sponsored cover album. I guess it's yet another entry in the three star category. I can't rate it higher because I don't really want to hear it again. But I can't dispense with it because I found it too interesting. It's kind of like seeing a movie where the director took a huge swing but it didn't really work. I have a soft spot for those types of artistic ventures.

not as good as Joni Mitchell’s Blue

Not really for me. Was not helping my depressive state this morning 😐 Strong 5

Pretty interesting album

It's pretty good.

I went into Oar expecting to like it, especially given its reputation, and the beginning actually worked pretty well for me. There’s something intriguing about the stripped-down sound and the raw, almost fragile quality of the recordings. It also reminded me quite a bit of Nick Drake, at least in the sense of the intimate acoustic arrangements and melancholic atmosphere. Unfortunately, I found it much harder to stay interested as the album went on. What initially felt haunting and personal gradually became repetitive and, eventually, pretty unbearable. The songs started to blur together, and the lo-fi quality that was interesting at first began to feel more exhausting than affecting. I can understand why Oar has become such a cult record, and there are definitely moments where you can hear the appeal. But for me, it felt like a much rougher and less compelling version of what I like about Nick Drake. Interesting in small doses, but by the end I was mostly waiting for it to be over.

(i went off and read wikipedia for this part because i was puzzled at not knowing who this guy was given the music i was hearing) apparently skip was a member of sixties san francisco group moby grape and spent six months in bellevue after trying to kill two of his fellow band members with an axe.  he wrote these songs while he was in bellevue and recorded them immediately after being released.  the album is actually just the demos he recorded (which explains a lot about the production quality), the record company it as is and it was their worst selling album ever.  soon they completely deleted it from their catalog.  then in the late 80s/early 90s someone released it again and it influenced a shit ton of people to make country-folk music, wilco in particular as near as i can hear.  tom waits?  probably.   anyway, it's a very sad lo-fi album made by a man in a very low place.  production not the greatest quality (demos after all), but very intimate and haunting.  country, folk, psychedelic.  i listened to the tracks that were only on the original release, apple music has a deluxe version that's longer.  i added it to my library and it's a 5/5 for me.  standouts for me were "war and peace" and "grey/afro"

Woefully unimpressive. Long, drawn-out psychedelic folk that didn't go anywhere, was brutally long, and didn't stand out all that much. Favorite Songs: Little Hands

709/1001 2026.09.24 🌕🌕🌑🌑🌑

God this is chaotic, in a good way but chaotic all the same. Songs meander and Melodies fade in and out. It’s evident even from these half formed sketches that he’s a decent song writer and guitar player, and sometimes like on Little hands it all comes together excellently. Sadly, sometimes like Grey Afro it’s kind of falls apart…

THIS MAN is called "Skip" for an AMAZING reason!

Das kann man nicht am Morgen hören, man schläft sofort wieder ein! Öde!

A wide pole used for steering canoes.

60’s

Folksy late 60’s

“Skip” is right!

A great find. This is a beautiful, raw, harrowing album. Reviewers seem to have rated this low. You’re wrong.

This is a story of the depths of human depravity - and by that I don’t mean the mental health issues Alexander “Skip” Spence was apparently suffering from at the time. Those are, of course, very evident in the recordings, but what truly horrifies me is the behavior of producer David Rubinson. It wasn’t enough that he left the recordings entirely in the hands of his engineer. No, he simply had this demo - in the artist’s view - released unfiltered. This kind of forced emotional exhibitionism would certainly lead to a major public controversy today, and this blatant abuse of Spence’s privacy rights would be called out as such. Needless to say, the album was a commercial flop, but: what on earth was Robert Dimery thinking when he included “Oar” in his book?

2.5 stars. A better story than it is a listen. Laurence of Euphoria is a banger tho.

Mucha mejor historia que disco. Se me ha hecho laaaaaargo.

Very average!

Oar isn't terrible, but it isn't for me either.

Psychedelic Folk is the musical fusion I didn't know I needed in my life. Because I don't. Boring.

As someone else here said, if a woman made this it would have no chance of being on this list. His voice is pretty good sometimes but overall nothing special in here

No description has ever made me more intrigued to listen to a record than this one has. Rubinstein’s actions were clearly exploitative, as he definitely saw something evocative of a mind in turmoil and tried to harvest it (though apparently in vain, if his goal was material reward). The record itself has some moments of brilliance, particularly in “War In Peace” and “Cripple Creak”.

Brutal

When this started I almost felt like I was in a frontier town. The type of place that people who are searching go to but never end up leaving. Almost a hole for ambition when they get too tired. As it kept going I couldn't help but think of playing older cassette tapes that are perfect but the more you play them the more the magnetic coating wastes away and eventually there's nothing left. Not a masterpiece, probably shouldn't be here, but what this felt like it didn't have made me reflect.

There doesn't seem to be anything special here. There is almost a desperation that comes through, which is kond of interesting. Just doesn't seem lole required listening.

There is a reason this has the fewest records sold by Columbia. It shouldn't be called OAR, it should be titled "Too much Acid rots your brain."

Ah good, another "musician dissociating from reality" product. This one's pretty good, though - well, good when it's good. It's too long at over an hour and there's such a wide variety of sounds here that it's hard to call it a complete whole. There are great turns of phrase, downturns in the vocals, some real experimentation with sounds, and then some pretty prosaic folk stuff for good measure. The gap between, say, Little Hands and Grey/Afro might be six albums of someone else's development, but I suppose if you can take an axe to your bandmate, you can do anything. Good listen, if uneven, but probably won't return. I'll take it over Syd Barrett any day, though.

Who? 1969 and I'm just hearing his name today? This is gonna suck. People would walk out of a bar on free beer night if he were singing. Listen to "Diana", he's dying I believe, but you can't stop him from singing about his lady friend. The man can't sing and the music is about as boring as it could be ("Broken Heart"). "Margaret Tiger Rug" was a rough draft that was horribly recorded. I hear the Syd Barrett reference in "War In Peace" but at least Syd had catchy hooks, no hooks in sight on this album. Let me challenge the author... Why is this a must hear Top 1001 album? What sets this apart from any other album you find in the $1 bin? It's so dreary. One more "Do Not Play This Artist" added to my Spotify preferences. 1 star, it was that bad.

2.5 Crazy story behind this one. You can tell this was unedited demos and I get what they were going for releasing it that way but also feel it holds it back. You can tell theres the start of some good songs but they're very rough. And towards the end it tails off completely

First Listen; 3; Interesting listen - reverb and acid drenched guitars and vocals. Sporadic drumming. I enjoyed listening to this, and as an exercise in laid-back, zoned-out, psychedelic rock. I don't know enough about it, but feels like this is a progenitor to slacker, drawly indie music like Kurt Vile and Mac Demarco. Seems like there's more inspiration here than there are tight songs that are worth relistening to. Favorite Track: War in Peace

nothing special here at all

He wrote all of this on the spot after he started recording, right? Because this sounds like a twelve year old Nick Drake having fun at Guitar Center.

Never heard of this album or that matter old skippy. But reading his wiki page and seeing who he has been involved with I should have. So once again this list has filled a gap in my musical knowledge but I’m not sure if this will be of benefit going forward. It’s a very different album which you don’t get very often. Many have compared it to Syd’s Madcap Laughs and whilst I can see where they are coming from in terms of Skippy and Syd’s mental health, Syd’s undoubted superior musical ability shines through. Whilst on this album some good enjoyable moments are spoilt by random changes of direction and unwanted noise. 2/5 11/9/26

Is this the first grunge album. I felt like I was listening to Nirvana at times. Sparse arrangements, intimate, DIY, nonchalant crooning. It’s all there. I cool album for sure.

Not the standard weirdo '60s psychedelic album that comes up in this project that I was expecting. If you told me this was a 90s indie guy I'd be on board. If he hasn't already, Nick Cave needs to cover "Weighted Down".

Oh Man - - there is a lot of everyone on this - Nick Drake, Dylan, Arlo Guthrie, Eddie Vedder - - but even with all of that "talent" the album is weak.

i shockingly really liked this. probably had more to do with the atmosphere in which i listened to this (background music while cooking on a rainy night), but would 100% listen again

4/10 The circumstances around this record are pretty sad. Alexander “Skip” Spence was the drummer on Jefferson Airplane’s debut album, before co-founding Moby Grape and playing guitar with them for three years until 1969. During that year he descended into a spiral of drug addiction and mental health problems, culminating in an attempt to break into bandmate Don Stevenson’s hotel room with an axe in order to murder him, believing himself to be the anti-christ and wanting to “save Stevenson from himself”. As a result, he was admitted to a psychiatric facility for six months, during which time he wrote the songs for this, his only solo record. He recorded most of the material on a three track recorder, intending for them to be demos that would be later fleshed out, but the label just released the tracks, and refused to do any promotion, deleting the record from their catalogue within a year of release. But is it any good? Well in all honesty, as you might expect from an album that was compiled from what the artists thought of as demos, it’s pretty raw and inconsistent. There are parts that are decidedly lo-fi, others that are well recorded and clear. In some tracks, Skip sings fairly coherently and in others he mumbles his way through, sounding like a man who had not really made it out of that psych ward. You can definitely feel the weight of tragedy through some of the songs, but in others, he almost seems to just be away with the fairies, plonking his way through fairly benign but upbeat songs like Margaret - Tiger Rug. The thing is, the slightly less coherent and off-the-wall stuff is kind of where the magic lies. Skip is clearly a talented musician (though not a great singer), and you can kind of hear the pain and derangement of his situation through the moments in which he pulls songs into weird shapes and textures. But those moments do flicker in and out of focus ass the album progresses, and there are as many moments in which he dishes out far more straight bluesy country stuff that ends up sounding limited in scope and weakly performed. It’s a conundrum really, and ultimately ends up being an album that doesn’t really fit into any one box. It’s not quite the documentation of a man pulling himself out of the depths of insanity, but it also isn’t the coherent work of a talented singer-songwriter. To me, it feels like this album probably got a resurgence more due to the story that surrounds it than the actual quality of the music. It’s a sad tale, not least because Skip was reported to never really be himself again in the 30 years that followed his breakdown. And maybe if he’s been allowed to finish this, it would have felt like a more coherent work. But as it is, it just ends up coming across as an interesting document of a struggling mind, rather than something of particularly high quality. Little Hands - It’s a quite nice 60s folk song to ease us in. It’s a bit mumbly on the vocal front, but I actually quite like the blend of lo-fi elements with more defined ones. The groove has a nice swung feel to it and it feels like it starts to ramp up the pace towards the end. The melodic choices are good and it’s an all round engaging piece of work. Not spectacular, necessarily, but intriguing and enjoyable. Cripple Creek - A bluesy little number now that definitely feels more like a sketch of a song rather than a finalised mix in some regards, particularly vocally. The guitar parts are more refined and complete, but the vocals make it feel quite rambling and lacking in coherence. Again, texturally, I quite like what it does, but it doesn’t really feel complete. Diana - There are some nice motifs in here and also moments in which Skip appears to be only loosely clinging on to his faculties and the thread of the work. Some of the guitar work feels like it’s losing that battle, to be honest, but it does manage to gather things together enough to give it a consistent, yet unsettling vibe. This is a strange album so far, and I really can’t tell what I think of it. Margaret - Tiger Rug - Again, hard to pin this down. It’s either an example of a dry wit mucking about, or it’s the nursery-rhyme coded ramblings of a man struggling to grip on to reality. I think I’m falling down on the latter side of the ledger here. There’s no complexity, and it feels incredibly freeform, but it’s certainly an intriguing listen. Weighted Down (The Prison Song) - Now we get something that’s way more coherent as a song. As a result, it’s actually less interesting, not least because it drags on for six and a half minutes. It’s a fairly straightforward composition, but there is something about the maudlin, slurred vocal delivery that gives it a bit of extra weight and power, which I did enjoy. War In Peace - There’s a pretty cool vibe to this one, and again, it feels like old Skip is teetering. He does pull things back towards coherence, particularly during the guitar solo section which has both a decent groove and an interesting approach to sound design and melody. It’s certainly wacky and he adds more tempo variation to go with the loose and roaming approach to structure and then fairly inexplicably ends by playing the riff from Sunshine Of Your Love. Broken Heart - A country blues number now that has some very nice moments of guitar playing, but the prominence of the loosely tuned and rambling vocal line really detracts from it. It’s quite a basic and boring song, unfortunately, and if you’re going to do something like this, I feel like it has to be more coherent and skilfully executed than this. Meh. All Come To Meet Her - This leans more into the psychedelic side of things and there’s a bunch of stuff that is pretty subtle and delicate within the arrangement. The vocals kind of sound like he’s just lying on the sofa testing out ideas, rather than being fully committed to them, and towards the end, things start to lose coherence and feel more cluttered. A very weird song in which there was a lot to like, but somehow it also felt quite confusing to listen to. Books Of Moses - The vibe and atmospheric work on this track is pretty cool, but musically it’s quite repetitive and again feels like a demo or concept, rather than a fully realised song. There are moments to enjoy, but the overall feeling was again, slight confusion and a real lack of any sticking power of the composition. Dixie Peach Promenade (Yin For Yang) - Another country blues number in which Skip rambles around over the top of a basic progression. It doesn’t even have the edge of weirdness about it to sell it in that direction either, so it just ends up feeling like an unoriginal and bland song that’s been shoddily recorded. Lawrence Of Euphoria - Now this one sounds like the kind of thing you’d hear at a poorly attended open mic night from the guy who turns up every week and sits too close to the newest person there, who is forced to spend their evening subtly and politely breathing through their mouth. It’s shit. Grey / Afro - Well this is weird, psychedelic and menacing. There’s a cool, brooding pulse to it, and the ebb and flow of the drums is a cool device that helps to enhance the texture of creeping insanity that underpins the work. The tempo variations are pretty interesting too. But did this need to be this long? No. I enjoyed aspects of it, but after a while, it lost its lustre and I just started to feel a bit bored by it.

Wasn't sure what to expect, but this was a suprisingly easy listen.

Almost feels like he's falling asleep while singing sometimes. Unsettling and weird.

i (skip)ped do sorry

Very sparse, haunting at times. Muddy vocals so they might be very profound but just can't tell. Not something I will come back to but I have no issue with it being on the list. Probably went on a bit long. With a fully produced album could have cut a few tracks, the last 6 tracks all being very short and really just ideas, indeed one is titled "Doodle".

2 - TERRIBLE

A common refrain in my reviews is my questioning the standards albums are judged on to make it onto the list. This is another one, but not because I think its bad. Its poignant, and remarkably filled with pain. This is psychedelic rock tinged folk, and the psychedelia is stemming from Spence's own inner demons. The songwriting and instrumentation are nothing groundbreaking, but they mark the journey of someone exploring the depths of their own mind, for better or poorer. This is an album that has a specific, niche audience. So again I wonder how this album is labeled required hearing for a larger audience.

Knowing the backstory helped me understand Oar, but it did not help me enjoy it. It starts out very Summer of Love, then veers into fragile psychedelic rambling, poor-man’s Johnny Cash, and whatever poor Diana did to deserve that song. 1.5 stars, rounding down in solidarity with Diana.

The songs scud past out of mist and squall, and on first pass are indistinct, impressionistic passes at modish shapes: cowboy ballad, didactic song, psychedelic drone, goofy nursery rhyme, Biblical fable, romantic lullaby, all off-centre and spellbinding if you’ve an ear for the uncanny. A close listen is needed to pick out crafty structures, swooning melodies and idiosyncratic craft. The guitar work is sublime, the rhythm parts chunk and spike, the rationed-out leads vivid like woodcuts. It’s John Ruskin-style gothic, hewn by lamplight, confident in its grotesqueries. This is the murkier big brother to Gene Clark’s “No Other”, the one that got expelled. Every track has a confident schema, an idea that spools out at speed. It took me until now to realise how intricate “Diana” is, three guitars playing together while leaving most of the song to space. “All Come to Meet Her” flirts past in two minutes with the air of a medieval hymn where only on return apparent repetition turns out to be unbroken iteration, a writhing chimera. Even the slightly, jokier songs - “Margaret-Tiger Rug”, “Dixie Peach Promenade” - distinguish themselves with their uneasiness. Cream’s killer “Sunshine of your love” riff reigned at the end of the sixties, but as far as I’ve heard “War and Peace” is the only homage that makes it terrifying, a coda spat out by Satan. “Weighted Down (The Prison Song)” perfects in a take the minimalist gloom that Souled American took three increasingly superb albums to derive. First time through, “Grey/Afro” bewitched me with its flanged drone. Second time, I was taken aback by how little went into it - was that it? Third time, it continued in my head for a long while after it finished. His drumming’s demented. What lyrics I’ve caught are clever, not always pleasant, cruelly humorous and fond of wordplay: “ An Olympic super swimmer/Whose belly doesn't flop/ A super racecar driver/ Who’s pitted can't be stopped/ A honey dripping hipster/Whose be- cannot be bopped Better to be rolled in oats Than from the roll be dropped“ Discourse around the circumstances of recording are an drag and do the album a disservice by framing it as an outsider art document of mental illness, romanticising suffering and trivialising music. Spence made this despite being ill.

Taken at face value, there are some interesting tunes buried in the simple production; taken as a memento of post-psychedelia psychosis, it's more fun to listen to than "The Madcap Laughs" (if closer maybe to "Opel"). More than one song sounded like a "John Wesley Harding" out-take, so there's some backhanded praise for you, Mark!

Not for me.

Seems like a deep cut and for good reason.

Harrowing and strange, but with some very interesting moments. I probably didn't give this one the effort it warrants.

Not bad enough to be a 1, not good enough to be a 3

It was fine, don’t need to revisit

Backstory more interesting than the album. Trauma does not equal art.

A somewhat unique wailing vocal over more-or-less traditional rock instrumentation. Not very pleasing to hear out of context.

Weird, but enjoyable. Reading about the album was more intense than the album itself. Still for this era, really great mixture of demo level songs turned into a cohesive album. Some of the avant garde stuff here was surely influential

2-

Music is supposed to be fun. But I also like when my music is taking seriously. I'm not saying that my favorite artists are super buttoned up but when they put out something it sounds like it was handled with care. That's what makes the imperfections so cool! This does not sound that way. Highlight: War In Peace