Requested: Coley's Goodbye Brains from the UK of 1972

A testament to the politics of our time, perhaps? 
In which a rotund and balloon-animal-like mayor can smoke crack 'maybe in one my drunken stupors' and retain a popularity rating of 40 percent among the presumably non-alcoholic population?  Denying to the press that he sexually harassed (by making cunnilungus comments) a female staffer by reporting he has an all-you-can-eat buffet already at home?  After being fired as football coach, losing his weekly radio show, being surveilled by police getting drunk in a van on high school property and peeing in the bushes, getting stripped of all his powers by city council, stuck in his home country and unable to travel, why, he said, should he resign?  No, why would any politician resign after that string of successes, momentarily making his city world-famous and late-night-comic ubiquitous?  After all, Marion Barry was caught smoking crack and went to jail, and was re-elected! 

But long after the furor dies down those poor Torontonians will still behold their mayor on their epidermis like a shingles rash, painful, ugly, and impossible to be rid of with topical emollients -- like so many other politicians out there in the world today parasitizing their poor quarter-unemployed populace with autocratic self-absorption and rapacious appetites under the eternal guise of a demagogue's ineffectual promise of cutting bureaucracies and taxes, like those flies who lay eggs in crickets and whose larvae feed on the insides of the insects starting with the least essential organs first such as the nervous system until every part is eaten and they break out of a dead and all-consumed shell of a cricket to find another prey...

Not my rip.  Some info can be found here.  Tom H. of course has already given it a well-deserved priority 2.  His review, unlike Rob Ford and so many other politicians in your respective home countries, is right on the money:

"A very crazy, and creative, horn rock band with a strong jazzy progressive feel. Some great wah wah fuzz guitar and fuzz bass which plays well against the trumpet/flugelhorn and saxophone. Some weird narration and flute passages. Much more complex than your average horn rock band - in the McLuhan and Probe 10 higher echelon of the genre. There's a couple of missteps like the country rock song and the final narrative piece, but overall this one is a winner and would love to see on CD."

Just a little minor adjustment to what he said in my own terms.  I don't think it's fair to call it a horn rock band because this recalls BST or Chicago, in fact, this is mostly instrumental music like Tony Campo's masterpiece Garuda, it's like the funkiest library record you can imagine being launched into an outer space of progressiveness (thanks to a billionaire internet titan's private rocket launch perhaps) with the craziest horn riffs you've ever heard on the backs of wah-wah guitar 7th chords plus flatted 10ths, such as here on the title track, Goodbye Brains, courtesy internet archive (which is, like sex with unknown females, as free as it is unattractive):




A highly enjoyable album altogether, and very much recommended. How did those guys back then write such fantastic music? I do enjoy the prose poem track about the old lady who urinates on herself while walking down the street-- OK it's not Gaspard de la nuit by Aloysius Bertrand, but have a listen to it and appreciate the literary value. The kind of track you will never hear on a CD made today.

Requested: The Cosmology of the United States ca. 1977

I remember like it was yesterday when I saw this record in New York City's Greenwich Village.  In those days before universal computer file sharing you could find a beautiful promising vinyl like this and on listening in the store the palpitations and muscle-tightening excitement you felt at discovering a lost and unknown gem was indescribable, particularly if like me you were relatively new at this game, unlike the old-timers (like Tom Hayes or Mauro M.) who had been collecting lost 70s gems since the eighties, or back when it still was then and the past was still the present.  And how many hours did I spend back then in those stores with my nose in a bunch of cardboard boxes, trying hard but failing to act as cool as the young deejays with their long hair and scruffy faces...

Nonetheless I was disappointed when I got home and found this to be relatively unprogressive, but beautiful on its own terms as a group soul-jazz album along the lines of US Matrix (the ones who did Matrix IX and Wizard I mean, not the one that d phillips called a masterpiece by Jack Grassel (lol).  These days with the facility of digital music-trading we get several gems every week and the excitement of finding a lost album is much less, and because we're scraping the bottom of the barrel, the really excellent albums are fewer and far between, though I believe they are still out there, based on what I've heard in the last year or more.  I often wish I could go back to those early days when it was so new and beautiful to find the lost progressive gems and hear them for the first time, wondering at the incredible imagination and creativity required to assemble a coherent rock album out of jazz, pop, classical, all these disparate elements, creating brand-new never before heard chord changes or riffs that are almost dissonant but still sound wonderful to these tired old ears.

The cover is a time capsule in itself, with singer Dawn Thompson in then-fashionable Cleopatra haircut, who wrote lyrics and contributed to the songwriting, holding a magic globe that no doubt brought her special mystical pyramid powers while the guy on her left with the super-long sideburns pairs a polyester earth-toned shirt open to his navel with string-tied linen earth-toned indian-styled baggy pants-- groovy, man, far-out!  As the milky way swirls around them.

Here is some more info.  Notice that Colin Walcott guests on sitar, congas, and percussion. For a limited time only (one week) a lossless will also be available.

The best track is Out From the Kiva (which is by John D'earth).  Thanks to Tristan Stefan for suggesting internet archive which is free but doesn't look as fancy predictably.





....

Jazz Impression - Le Vice et la Paresse, France 1978

After hearing the superb Jean-Jacques Ruhlmann's Imagination, Enigme Infini, I checked his discography to see if possibly there are more treasures to be unearthed.  Oddly enough this brilliant sax and flute player did not have a lot of credits in terms of composition.  The one piece by him on this 1978 outing, called "Si le Coeur eclate" is just stunning though, very much of the same temperament and style as the previous posting, with chamber arrangements to add immense interest.  In fact the whole record turned out to be mysteriously gorgeous and brilliantly composed, the majority from the pianist whose name is Francois Couturier.  He as well is not quite as prominent in a seventies discography as one would expect or hope.

The album title (vice and laziness) is taken from the side-long suite which takes up the whole of the second side, written again by the pianist.  This was recorded in Tours, a beautiful city in the Loire valley with a gorgeous cathedral and many medieval-era houses.  The Loire valley, in the Western part of France, is brimming with gorgeous fairy-tale castles in a forested and bucolic landscape and is to me (like clichéd Tuscany) one of the most beautiful places on earth.

Anyways, this is how we try to discover lost treasures, by following long-lost leads, cold cases now sitting in bins in record stores all over the world, one of which might turn out to be a classic utterly forgotten to mankind...

Anyone have any idea of a good free uploader for song samples?  Now I have exhausted my 2-hour free limit for soundcloud, which is a beautiful site, but I don't want to spend a dozen dollars a month on something that I am doing for nothing.

Känguru's original ST album from 1981 [by request]

This album luckily has been released to CD by spalax music.  It's unfortunate that more of these don't get reissued.  Out of respect for the artists I will only post the upload for a week, please hurry.

This band with the umlaut is not to be confused with the Aussie band also spelled the same way (which I at one time thought was the same), the latter played in an ethnic fusion style that indeed would not have been out of place in Germany in the seventies, but in this case, yes they were out of place since they were in Australia, a wholly different continent.  At any rate, that one is recommended too for those who haven't heard it.

Golgotha - Beat-Oratorium, Germany 1974

Here's an album from the classic period of German Krautrock/prog that I've seen requested oftentimes, and it's still very rare and relatively expensive.  It doesn't actually appeal too much to my taste, but I know many out there just adore this style of music.  Basically, in keeping with the oratorium idea, we have some very classical-styled compositions mixed with krautrock.