A really great Jazz/Prog Rock album and interestingly with Peter Cetera, later of Chicago fame, as one of its members.
AMG says that "the self-titled Aorta, is today highly acclaimed as a lite-psych album of minor renown, and though it managed to chart on Billboard's album charts, it failed to do what was expected."
An excellent album but I would give the first track a miss. Hardly sold at the time but now highly sought after.
ProgArchives says "Aquila's music, while substantially based in art rock, draws in influences from a diverse range of influences, including jazz and heavy rock."
One of the first bands I saw live, still have the cassette somewhere in Lowife Towers
Capability Brown had and still have a cult following in UK music history as a "progressive" band, ultimately based on an outstanding piece from their second album, Voice. But largely their range covered mainstream pop music, treated in an "arty", alternative fashion. The band was a six-piece in which everyone sang and played instruments. The line-up consisted of Tony Ferguson (guitar, bass), Dave Nevin (keyboards, guitar, bass), Kenny Rowe (bass, percussion), Grahame White (guitar, lute, balalaika, keyboards), Joe Williams (percussion) and Roger Willis (drums, keyboards). Ferguson and Nevin wrote the majority of the band's material, and the band also excelled in covers of obscure material (Rare Bird's Beautiful Scarlet and Redman, Argent's Liar, Affinity's I Am And So Are You and Steely Dan's Midnight Cruiser). Capability Brown's forte was vocalizing. Together they sounded not unlike The Association: a massed choir of voices, ranging from baritone to high clean falsettos. Their first album, From Scratch, which included Liar, was average and unexceptional. The second album Voice, released in 1973, was their claim to fame, incorporating an over-20-minute richly melodic piece called Circumstances (In Love, Past, Present, Future Meet) - a stunning piece of music incorporating keyboards, a cappela voices, synthesizers and mellotrons, solo vocals, delicate harpsichord-like acoustic guitar sections, powerful electric guitar chords and massed vocal choirs. The band did not manage to record again after this, and in 1974 Tony, Roger and Graham were recruited by friend and Christie member Roger Flavell to join his group, Christie for a tour of South America. Thus Capability Brown was no more.
@Lowlife thanks for the intro to Capability Brown. I had never come across them before and any band that does a cover of a song by one of my favourite bands Affinity (“I Am And So Are You”) has to be good! “Circumstances” from the album “Visions” is a tour de force. Do you have any other hidden treasures!!??
AMG says "The self-titled debut album of this unfairly neglected psychedelic band is an odd mix of slick studio work laced with surprising moments of eclecticism, from soundtrack references to hard rock worthy of the best bands of the time."
Try the track "San Francisco Girls (Return of the Native)" to take you back to the Psychedelic late 60s!
"Medusa" by Trapeze. A great Psych/Hard Rock album from 1970.
AMG says "Not only is Medusa the finest offering from '70s outfit Trapeze, it is one of the decade's most underappreciated hard rock recordings. With a lineup that consisted of future Deep Purple, Judas Priest, and Black Sabbath members....it's a wonder that the record isn't mentioned more when influential albums of this era are discussed."
AMG says "Ivory may be the finest Jefferson Airplane album not by Jefferson Airplane themselves......the band's sole album stands up as menacing, tough-nosed psychedelia loaded with flashes of genuine brilliance."
RYM review says "One of the many projects that Miller Anderson was involved in, solid blues rock with good vocals and remarkable keyboard parts from Wynder K. Frog. A one-album band between his stays with Keef Hartley and Savoy Brown and that is where it also sits musically."
"Trip Thru Hell" the 1969 Psychedelic Rock album by C.A. Quintet. Well worth a listen.
AMG says "There's not much to compare this album to, even in the weird musical climate of 1968 -- there are echoes of Country Joe & The Fish and the Doors, perhaps, in the mysterioso organ and morbid imagery..........psychedelia was very rarely this dementedly gloomy. Occasional pealing bells and curdling screams (to say nothing of the Boschlike cover art) add to the foggy underworld menace"
1968 baroque pop meets Indo- Jazz fusion with future legend Collin Walcott on sitar and tabla. Stylistically a bit all over the map, it will remind you of all sorts of soft psych.
Guerssen Records on Bandcamp says "With only 200 copies released in 1975, the “Stud” album has become a holy grail for collectors. A mystery for many years (all the band members used pseudonyms on the album credits), many people failed to track the band down…until now!.
Formed in 1974 in Houston, Stud featured the killer lead guitar of 17-year-old genius Tim Williams, the brutal Rickenbacker bass attacks of Paul Eakin and the solid as a rock drumming of George Lasher. The chemistry was born since they first starting played together and after many rehearsals, they decided they were ready to record their first album. So they entered the Barons Studios in Rosenberg and “Stud” was the result. Powerful hard-rock on songs like “A woman like you” or “Jim/Blues”, killer boogie-rock (“Captain Boogie”), hard-psychedelic jams (the 12+ minutes of “Stud”) and progressive hard-rock on the impressive “The war song”."
Sensational ultra obscure Psychedelic/Hard Rock album "Stoned Circus" (alternatively called "Stoned Circus - Revisited") originally recorded in 1970 by The Stoned Circus..
Not to be confused with the Stone Circus (without a "d") s/t album from 1969 which is also really good.
"Exclamation Mark" the 1969 Psychedelic album by Pesky Gee!, a band that soon became better known when it changed its name to Black Widow.
The original tracks such as "Another Country", "A Place of Heartbreak" and "Dharma One" are really good but don't bother with the covers which are, at the best, average.
The Head Shop s/t album from 1969, full of great psych music which says it all for the 1960s tripped out era that we can't possibly remember! Well worth a listen.
One recent reviewer describes the music as "a demented fusion of ’69 era heavy psych and ’66 era garagepunk"!
Strangely enough, Larry Coryell was a guest musician on the album.
Comments
A really great Jazz/Prog Rock album and interestingly with Peter Cetera, later of Chicago fame, as one of its members.
AMG says that "the self-titled Aorta, is today highly acclaimed as a lite-psych album of minor renown, and though it managed to chart on Billboard's album charts, it failed to do what was expected."
An excellent album but I would give the first track a miss. Hardly sold at the time but now highly sought after.
ProgArchives says "Aquila's music, while substantially based in art rock, draws in influences from a diverse range of influences, including jazz and heavy rock."
One of the first bands I saw live, still have the cassette somewhere in Lowife Towers
Capability Brown had and still have a cult following in UK music history as a "progressive" band, ultimately based on an outstanding piece from their second album, Voice. But largely their range covered mainstream pop music, treated in an "arty", alternative fashion. The band was a six-piece in which everyone sang and played instruments. The line-up consisted of Tony Ferguson (guitar, bass), Dave Nevin (keyboards, guitar, bass), Kenny Rowe (bass, percussion), Grahame White (guitar, lute, balalaika, keyboards), Joe Williams (percussion) and Roger Willis (drums, keyboards).
Ferguson and Nevin wrote the majority of the band's material, and the band also excelled in covers of obscure material (Rare Bird's Beautiful Scarlet and Redman, Argent's Liar, Affinity's I Am And So Are You and Steely Dan's Midnight Cruiser).
Capability Brown's forte was vocalizing. Together they sounded not unlike The Association: a massed choir of voices, ranging from baritone to high clean falsettos. Their first album, From Scratch, which included Liar, was average and unexceptional. The second album Voice, released in 1973, was their claim to fame, incorporating an over-20-minute richly melodic piece called Circumstances (In Love, Past, Present, Future Meet) - a stunning piece of music incorporating keyboards, a cappela voices, synthesizers and mellotrons, solo vocals, delicate harpsichord-like acoustic guitar sections, powerful electric guitar chords and massed vocal choirs.
The band did not manage to record again after this, and in 1974 Tony, Roger and Graham were recruited by friend and Christie member Roger Flavell to join his group, Christie for a tour of South America. Thus Capability Brown was no more.
ProgArchives says "'Awake' is among the definitive LPs of the post-underground Canadian rock scene."
AMG says "The self-titled debut album of this unfairly neglected psychedelic band is an odd mix of slick studio work laced with surprising moments of eclecticism, from soundtrack references to hard rock worthy of the best bands of the time."
Try the track "San Francisco Girls (Return of the Native)" to take you back to the Psychedelic late 60s!
AMG says "Not only is Medusa the finest offering from '70s outfit Trapeze, it is one of the decade's most underappreciated hard rock recordings. With a lineup that consisted of future Deep Purple, Judas Priest, and Black Sabbath members....it's a wonder that the record isn't mentioned more when influential albums of this era are discussed."
AMG says "Ivory may be the finest Jefferson Airplane album not by Jefferson Airplane themselves......the band's sole album stands up as menacing, tough-nosed psychedelia loaded with flashes of genuine brilliance."
Particularly worth trying are the first two tracks "Awake" and "Highway to Love"
Really good, solid Blues Rock
RYM review says "One of the many projects that Miller Anderson was involved in, solid blues rock with good vocals and remarkable keyboard parts from Wynder K. Frog. A one-album band between his stays with Keef Hartley and Savoy Brown and that is where it also sits musically."
AMG says "There's not much to compare this album to, even in the weird musical climate of 1968 -- there are echoes of Country Joe & The Fish and the Doors, perhaps, in the mysterioso organ and morbid imagery..........psychedelia was very rarely this dementedly gloomy. Occasional pealing bells and curdling screams (to say nothing of the Boschlike cover art) add to the foggy underworld menace"
Guerssen Records on Bandcamp says "With only 200 copies released in 1975, the “Stud” album has become a holy grail for collectors. A mystery for many years (all the band members used pseudonyms on the album credits), many people failed to track the band down…until now!.
Formed in 1974 in Houston, Stud featured the killer lead guitar of 17-year-old genius Tim Williams, the brutal Rickenbacker bass attacks of Paul Eakin and the solid as a rock drumming of George Lasher. The chemistry was born since they first starting played together and after many rehearsals, they decided they were ready to record their first album. So they entered the Barons Studios in Rosenberg and “Stud” was the result. Powerful hard-rock on songs like “A woman like you” or “Jim/Blues”, killer boogie-rock (“Captain Boogie”), hard-psychedelic jams (the 12+ minutes of “Stud”) and progressive hard-rock on the impressive “The war song”."
https://studband.bandcamp.com/album/stud
A mix of the ordinary and the really good. The best tracks are numbers 1 to 3, 5, 7 and 8.
Not to be confused with the Stone Circus (without a "d") s/t album from 1969 which is also really good.
The original tracks such as "Another Country", "A Place of Heartbreak" and "Dharma One" are really good but don't bother with the covers which are, at the best, average.
"A Place Of Heartbreak" by Pesky Gee!
One recent reviewer describes the music as "a demented fusion of ’69 era heavy psych and ’66 era garage punk"!
Strangely enough, Larry Coryell was a guest musician on the album.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Head_Shop