Madura 1 and 2, 1971 & 1973

Like, wow.  It amazes me there's still gems like this I never heard of.  Maybe some of you knew it already, but I didn't.  After so many years of collecting this stuff, hard for me to believe.

When do I run out finally?

Here's a spot-on review on discogs, for once:

I bought this album when it first appeared on the shelves at local record stores way back when. Unlike today, you couldn't preview albums to see if it was a dud, or if your newspaper route earnings would truly be spent wisely. Sometimes, I would just look at the cover, read the personnel notes, associate members with other bands I'd heard of, etc.. and just take a chance - sometimes extremely disappointed - sometimes inspired beyond words. This gem was one of the latter, to put it in simple terms. I played the plastic right of this generously pressed double - album ear candy. All I could ask is "Why isn't there a HUGE cult following?" I really don't know, but I've turned so many people with discriminating tastes (both listeners and musicians) on to this goldmine and all agree - it is one diversely played out and produced LPs of my generation. The musicianship is superb - the vocals exceptional (the lead vocalist reminds me a lot of the late Terry Kath of "Chicago") and the entire project wreaks of energy and soulfulness - This is the REAL DEAL. You have every genre of music under the sun in this compilation, from Jazz to Funk - from Rock to Blues - I just cannot say enough good about it. Do yourself a favor and chase down a copy. I wore out 2 copies and it was extremely difficult to find another, but I managed. It looks like they are a little more common to find lately. Thanks for the great music guys!! Enough jawing. Go listen!!

So there's a lot to agree with in there.  Remember spending your 5 or 7 dollars allowance or chore money without having any idea of the contents of a record other than that it had a good reputation, or an intriguing cover?  Remember reading a rave review in the old Rolling Stone by some moronic coke-addled critic who adored I-IV-V and called the sequence brilliant, or in the encyclopedia of rock, and then being bitterly, bitterly disappointed at how terrible the songs were?  That's why it was so wonderful when those used record stores with dollar-bins showed up... or when you had friend collectors whose dads already had huge collections you could just 'illegally' copy on cassettes...

This album is sometimes all over the place as he said, but mostly stays in the funky or bluesy horn-rock electric guitar mode with a lot of different ideas-- in that respect, reminds me a lot of the little known US band I presented a year ago called The Screaming Gypsy Bandits-- that Doghead collection, I'm referring to, perhaps because it was a collaboration with multiple songwriters, or a hippie commune, where the women were shared as freely as the dirty bedsheets (Yech.)  Or maybe you could say it's like Backdoor, my recent post with horns tuned down and guitars turned up.  What really matters is that the songs are quite inventive and the riffs original, with a base of 'psychedelic rock' which usually implies simple 60's chord changes, but here, not at all.  And they had so many ideas that the first album is a double LP, like I think Chicago did, didn't they?  Or may be that was Chicago 2.

The other thing is look at those album images-- wow, wow.... they don't make covers like that anymore, do they.  The prosaic ordinariness of the farm image-- it says so much.  So American too.

Consider the track Doctor Honoris Causa (i.e., Honorary Doctorate for a [good] reason, like Jeffrey Epstein's degree from Harvard which had numerous-- counting in the teen numbers-- good reasons behind it).  This is from the second album. It's not just the high energy fusion rhythm section, the excitement of the percussive motor, the swirling synths, the interesting chord drops up and down keeping the flow going strong, the addition of interesting instrumentation with the unexpected appearance of horns, the light touch of strings, the never-ending movement of the piece that sounds like an exciting vision-packed train trip through a dense slum like Calcutta, but fast forward to the 4:06 mark, the keyboard chord that ke knocks out on top of the driving C tonic, which is so totally abruptly different-- it's chords like that, to me, differentiate this particular 70s style of progressive rock from anything which is done today (cf. the recent recommendations in these pages like Zopp)--  a chord like that has never been heard before and likely will never be heard again in the history of human music:

Incredible, just incredible.  How did they come up with these ideas, back then?  The giants lived in the past, as the Greeks well knew...

From the first album, with its all-crazy themes of dreams, death, rebirth, reincarnation, redemption and damnation, remember my wife's usual comment they where all stoned back then, My Love is Free:

Absolutely insane?  So you're sitting in a university class on songwriting or pop composition, the prof presents this song to be analyzed by the students as the perfect example of Everything Wrong, What Not To Do when composing melody, chords, ideas, lyrics.  Please people, please avoid these mistakes if you wish to have that number one hit.  You have broken multiple rules of harmony here.  

And that's exactly what makes me happy.  

Thank you to the men who created these gems.

Thank you to the folks who share them.