Polvo return after more than ten years on hiatus with a mouthwatering taster from the upcoming album In Prism, out in September.
This is Polvo in HD, all jagged shiny guitars and pounding, lean drumbeats. They sound like a new band, oozing belief. If the rest of the album is as good as this, it will be something special.
Recorded in Abbey Road in the same period as Sgt. Pepper and Piper at the Gates of Dawn, by Norman "Normal" Smith, this is top-notch British psych with just as much warped imagination to it as the two aforementioned masterpieces, yet done on a far smaller budget.
I just bought the 2003 remaster today and its wonders are still sinking in. I can't believe I've missed out on it all these years. In my ignorance I always had The Pretty Things down as Stones clones, but this is way better than Mick n' Keef's psychedelic efforts.
It came out belatedly in 1968, was barely promoted by EMI, and duly bombed. A big pity.
Agitation Free came from the same late-Sixties West Berlin commune scene as Ash Ra Tempel and Tangerine Dream but never gained the same level of recognition outside their native city as their contemporaries. This, their debut album, was partly recorded on a 1972 tour that took in Egypt, Cyprus and Greece and crackles with inventive, eastern-tinged psychedelia.
Underneath the duelling guitars and spacey, snaky synth-lines of Malesch, trance-like desert rhythms and taped sounds of humid dusky cities weave in and out, leaving you with the feeling you are right there in the smoky, smelly tour van with them.
Parts of this album really remind me of Tortoise's kaleidoscopic, genre-bending Millions Now Living Will Never Die (1996). Gifted musicians having fun, but not at our expense.
If you like this, show them some love on Myspace. There's a good bio there too.
After an eight-year silence since their last opus Getaway, one of my most treasured bands of all-time The Clean are returning in September with what is only the fifth album of their stop-start 31-year "career". It is released on Merge, and is titled Mister Pop.
You can download an mp3 called "In the Dream Life You Need a Rubber Soul" here.
Here's a blast of classic Clean, from Unknown Country called "Twist Top".
P.S. Singer David Kilgour has released some damn fine solo stuff over the years, A Feather in the Engine (2001) probably being the high point thus far. His most recent album, a collaboration with poet Sam Hunt, Falling Debris came out in April and is streaming here. The Clean Myspace
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