|
I only recently heard of Rain Parade after buying the "Children of Nuggets" box set and was impressed by their mellow vocals and guitar work that I found reminiscent of "Revolver" era Beatles and early Floyd. This album had that and more. When it's over I just want to hit play again. Melodic, hypnotic and timeless.
The Birth of Indie music. Grab this disc while u can, totally worth the money.
This isn't really the trippy psychedelic rock but rather a band focused more on subtle jangle melodies. Oh, how pleased I am to have come across this band and album about a year ago. I was a fan of Mazzy Star at that time, and with the knowledge that David Roback was also related with Rain Parade, I thought this album would be worth a shot. My favorites are "Carolyn's Song", "Look at Merri", "Saturday's Asylum", "Kaleidoscope", and "Broken Horse". Give it a try if you want something reminiscent of '60s psychedelic rock a little on the downtrodden side.
I remember listening to Explosions in 1984 after I'd just left school, it's summer I'm high Blue is playing, I'm happy. Great to see it rereleased with 3rd Rail. Been trying to find it in the UK for the past year or so.
These last songs occupy a middle ground between the two styles on the LP, with a sound that settles down and blends the gloomier dirges with the peppier-poppish song-styles. A caution for anyone expecting from the CD title(s) some acid-drenched freakout. Fans of Opal and perhaps the later Mazzy Star might like this album, as it shows David Roback and company--many of whom backed the later bands (see also the Rainy Day side project, the RP's odds-and-ends Demolition LP, and the non-D. This is decidedly a bit narcoleptic--it lacks the full-blown (or bloated) effects that so many original (circa 1966/7) inspirations and neo-psych contemporaries piled on top of their winsome tunes. This isn't the noisefest that the title seems to promise. Not as raucous as Salvation Army, but you can hear in RP hints of the earlier punk-pop scene in the three vocalists' untutored but determined delivery of downbeat lyrics. These sound much more like a band playing Sunset Strip such as Buffalo Springfield, or the politer side of the emerging psychedelic LA pioneers.
The first six songs on this CD reissue, that is, the first half of the E3rdRail LP, sound in retrospect much like Opal, except with male vocals rather than Kendra Smith's dreamier, sleepy style. Sort of like The Three O'Clock if they were less exuberant or chipper--or twee. These songs tend to move contemplatively, with nearly no obvious pandering to a more pop sensibility or a poser's easy donning of the outward style without the secret attitude that marks true psych. Roback-helmed record it seems).
I'm old enough to have remembered this hometown band and I had bought the LP and EP when they came out--so, how have two decades and more effected my reception now to Rain Parade's sounds. Janglier, more effusive, with vocals mixed more to the front, and plaintive if convincingly earnest musical and singing projection that appeals more to the pop side of this style. These are more accessible cuts than side one--a surprise that flips the usual sequencing of albums.The final songs come from their later EP. The songs are more fleshed out with noticeably but still subtly more emphatic (although still restrained by comparison with many neo-psych bands) production and arranging. They hold back rather than release tension.While other listeners have heard more baroque influences in these grooves, I do not: as I found way back in its vinyl versions, RP creates more ambience by suggestion rather than action. What RP has in common with later 80s/early 90s LA neo-psych is their concentration, and rather somber, self-important stance (which comes with any D. RP's more austere. Roback remnants of the band shifting into Viva Saturn) preparing for their later reliance on narcoleptic female faux-folkish singers, Kendra Smith, in fact, is credited on one song here.
Rather than provide glaring flourishes, they retreat. The music's quiet, and made for introspection, as the band's name portends.The liveliest cuts come on side 2, the next five songs, that is, side 2 of the LP. This is the sound that sparked a decade or so of activity along the same doleful paths into the center of the haunted mind. The band favors an often langorous, more swirling sound that deepens these musicians' trek into the mind more than the body, to mirror the interior, less obvious, effect of the SoCal pop-turns-psych 1966-7 sounds that, somehow, endured to re-surface with this band, beginning in the aftermath of punk and the accompanying stirrings of renewed countryish-indie-rock among those too young for hippies but old enough for early punk.and then branching out into the past 60s sounds to make them fresh again, around 15-20 years later after the groovy Sunset Strip era in LA.
|
