1. Flying High
2. Not So Sweet Martha Lorraine
3. Death Sound Blues
4. Porpoise Mouth
5. Section 43
6. Super Bird
7. Sad And Lonely Times
8. Love
9. Bass Strings
10. Masked Marauder
11. Grace
After being relentlessly beaten into submission by finals, it is once again time to remember there's a blog going on. And what better way than with this day-glo artifact of the '60s? This album contains most of the psychedelic tropes that we know and love: incredibly cheesy organ, a bunch of mind-expanding jargon in the lyrics, including a particularly subtle bit where "LSD" is whispered at the end of a song....it's music that you can put over a montage of hippies dancing in parks and then sell to baby boomers. They'll eat it up.
This album isn't really what anyone would call catchy, but Country Joe and his ilk make up for it with psychedelic inventiveness. There's a pretty good range of sounds on here, from psych-blues ('Death Sound Blues', shockingly enough!) to a couple of longer tracks where the band lets their considerably long hair down and gets to jamming. 'Section 43' is a standout and just might be the best song on the record, but 'Grace' just sort of meanders along without any sense of where it's going to go.
There's honestly not a lot to write here about this album. It seems to function more as a sort of time capsule to 1967 San Francisco as it actually was, not how it was romanticized in a series of bland pop hits about wearing flowers in your hair and what have you. Like the 13th Floor Elevators before them, these guys were waaaaaaaay too freaky to possibly land a hit record. But when you have a song about making LBJ take acid, who needs hits? 8.5/10
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