Although Fresh Maggots' sole album has a greater range of arrangements with a folk-rock base than many U.K. folk-rock albums of the time do, the songs aren't special enough to move this out of the desirable-mostly-for-the-sake-of-its-rarity category. While much of the material is acoustic and folky at the core, it's embellished by a good deal of instrumentation by Mick Burgoyne, who plays tin whistles, violin, and glockenspiel, in addition to some surprisingly burning distorted electric guitar. The tunes are pleasant but not brilliant, and kind of repetitive. If "Dole Song" takes an unusual subject as its focus (signing on to "the dole," or welfare, in Britain), other compositions can be simplistic to the point of awkwardness…
The Fresh Sound label is one of the major reissue record companies, also releasing new music on their Fresh Sound New Talent subsidiary. Fresh Sound, under the direction of the tireless Jordi Pujol, has repackaged and reissued a great deal of very valuable jazz from the 1950s and early 1960s. In addition to the major names, some of their most intriguing sets focus on obscure figures from jazz history whose music has been out-of-print for decades.
Italo disco - musical marketing term introduced in 1983 by Bernhard Mikulski, the founder of the record label ZYX Records. The term addressed to the Italian electronic dance music of the 1980s and the music from other parts of Europe and North America that imitated these sounds. A typical song Italo disco had contrasting form of verse, chorus executable, support was based on the use of the synthesizer and is usually sung in English European Italian.
Fresh Cream represents so many different firsts, it's difficult to keep count. Cream, of course, was the first supergroup, but their first album not only gave birth to the power trio, it also was instrumental in the birth of heavy metal and the birth of jam rock. That's a lot of weight for one record and, like a lot of pioneering records, Fresh Cream doesn't seem quite as mighty as what would come later, both from the group and its acolytes. In retrospect, the moments on the LP that are a bit unformed – in particular, the halting waltz of "Dreaming" never achieves the sweet ethereal atmosphere it aspires to – stand out more than the innovations, which have been so thoroughly assimilated into the vocabulary of rock & roll, but Fresh Cream was a remarkable shift forward in rock upon its 1966 release and it remains quite potent.
This is a rehash of the medieval themes and romantic piano pieces found on the first Fresh Aire. Fresh Aire II gets the nod over the debut by separating the two styles rather than alternating them; the side-long "Fantasia" consists of variations on a stirring medieval theme, not as fertile as Rick Wakeman or Camel's The Snow Goose perhaps, but not far off the mark either. The variations are described as doors (a convenient allusion given the music's conduciveness to reverie), with the intended effect of each described with Epimethean acuity by (presumably) Chip Davis. Without all those precious piano interludes in the middle, Mannheim manages to steamroll its way through more than 15 minutes of medieval mind candy.
Chip Davis didn't have to look far for inspiration on Fresh Aire 7, using the occasion to indulge a long-standing interest in the number seven. The result is rather strict program music: the seven chakras are aligned to seven unique works, the seven colors (or "colours" if you live in the U.K. or Nebraska) of the rainbow are transcribed into seven separate notes/instruments, a seven-part rondo is recorded between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. on a single day, etc…
Although Fresh Maggots' sole album has a greater range of arrangements with a folk-rock base than many U.K. folk-rock albums of the time do, the songs aren't special enough to move this out of the desirable-mostly-for-the-sake-of-its-rarity category. While much of the material is acoustic and folky at the core, it's embellished by a good deal of instrumentation by Mick Burgoyne, who plays tin whistles, violin, and glockenspiel, in addition to some surprisingly burning distorted electric guitar. The tunes are pleasant but not brilliant, and kind of repetitive. If "Dole Song" takes an unusual subject as its focus (signing on to "the dole," or welfare, in Britain), other compositions can be simplistic to the point of awkwardness…