Alexander 'skip' Spence

No one except psychedelic Renaissance man Alexander "Skip" Spence could have created an album such as Oar. Alternately heralded as a "soundtrack to schizophrenia" and a "visionary solo effort," Oar became delegated to cut out and bargain bins shortly after its release in the spring of 1969. However those who did hear it were instantly drawn into Spence's inimitable sonic surrealism. As his illustrious past in the Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and Moby Grape would suggest, this album is a pastiche of folk and rock. In reality, however, while these original compositions may draw from those genres, each song has the individuality of a fingerprint…

No one except psychedelic Renaissance man Alexander "Skip" Spence could have created an album such as Oar. Alternately heralded as a "soundtrack to schizophrenia" and a "visionary solo effort," Oar became delegated to cut-out and bargain bins shortly after its release in the spring of 1969. However, those who did hear it were instantly drawn into Spence's inimitable sonic surrealism. As his illustrious past in the Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and Moby Grape would suggest, this album is a warped blend of acid folk and far-out psychedelic rock. While these original compositions do draw heavily from those genres, each song has the individuality of a fingerprint, and Spence performed and produced every sound on the album himself at Columbia studios in Nashville in the space of less than two weeks…

No one except psychedelic Renaissance man Alexander "Skip" Spence could have created an album such as Oar. Alternately heralded as a "soundtrack to schizophrenia" and a "visionary solo effort," Oar became delegated to cut-out and bargain bins shortly after its release in the spring of 1969. However, those who did hear it were instantly drawn into Spence's inimitable sonic surrealism. As his illustrious past in the Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and Moby Grape would suggest, this album is a warped blend of acid folk and far-out psychedelic rock. While these original compositions do draw heavily from those genres, each song has the individuality of a fingerprint, and Spence performed and produced every sound on the album himself at Columbia studios in Nashville in the space of less than two weeks…

Collection features 4 CDs of the greatest artists, the biggest songs and the harder-to-find hits all uniquely themed to a genre… One could argue whether every track collected in this four-disc set is actually psychedelic or not, however one defines the term when it is applied to pop music, but everything here originally appeared at the close of the 1960s or the start of the 1970s, a time when pop music, and rock in particular, was expanding and playing with the notion of time, space, drugs, and a planet-wide pop culture. All that aside, there are some classic decked-out sides here, psychedelic or not, like the Lovin' Spoonful's "Summer in the City," the Amboy Dukes' "Journey to the Center of the Mind," Santana's "Soul Sacrifice," Moby Grape's "Omaha," the Byrds' "Eight Miles High," and Argent's "Hold Your Head Up," among dozens of other slightly tilted hits from the era.

There’s no question that Manchester’s Dead Sea Apes have made an impressive footprint in the world of heavy psych. Things change quickly from there though. Relying more on gravity - and gravitas - the heaviness of Dead Sea Apes is far beyond an arbitrary turning up of the volume knob and a trip to the the guitar shop for just one more fuzz pedal. Underneath the slow-burn bone-rattlings and rumblings, there’s a deliberateness and nuance to their catalogue that sets them apart from other bands that traffic in bringing the ‘heaviosity’. While their influences and methods may not be obvious to the casual listener, it’s the deep divers that Dead Sea Apes speak to…

Sixty Six to Timbuktu has to be the icing on the cake for Robert Plant. After Led Zeppelin issued its second live album as well as a spectacular DVD in 2003, his career retrospective outside of the band is the new archetype for how they should be compiled. Containing two discs and 35 cuts, the set is divided with distinction. Disc one contains 16 tracks that cover Plant's post-Zep recording career via cuts from his eight solo albums. Along with the obvious weight of his former band's presence on cuts like "Tall Cool One," "Promised Land," and "Tie Dye on the Highway," there is also the flowering of the influence that Moroccan music in particular and Eastern music in general would have on him in readings of Tim Hardin's "If I Were a Carpenter," Jesse Colin Young's "Darkness, Darkness," and his own "29 Palms." There is also a healthy interest in technology being opened up on cuts from Pictures at Eleven and Now & Zen…