Meteodyn WT

Best known as a member of the legendary Welsh band Man, Deke Leonard also enjoyed a successful solo career in the early 1970s.
Iceberg (1973). Though Deke Leonard had made his reputation playing progressive rock in the Welsh group Man, his first solo album has more of a roots rock feel than anything released by that band. Roots rock played by someone with a taste for odd arrangements, perhaps, but roots rock nevertheless. "Lisa" and "Jesse" both sound like something that the Band might have turned out, country fiddle, organ, and all, though Leonard's distinctive, reedy voice makes it unlikely that anyone is actually going to mistake one for the other…

Raw, sometimes sloppy material by this enigmatic, psychedelic cult band appeared on an extremely rare debut album in 1966 (their first LP for Reprise, Part One, is usually considered their first recording). The West Coast Pop Art were always a strange act, and this collection does nothing to tarnish that perception. It's not so much the weirdness of the sound - they could be plenty weird per se on Zappaesque freak-outs like "Insanity" (co-penned by Kim Fowley), but only occasionally. It's more the sheer unpredictable range of the material. One minute they're attacking "Louie, Louie" and the classic jazz instrumental "Work Song" with all the finesse of teenagers in their bedroom; the next they're doing pretty psych-pop tunes with a bizarre edge, like "I Won't Hurt You"; then there are the Dylan covers, which are approached as if they are Yardbirds' tunes, with splashes of feedback and hard rock/R&B arrangements…

The s in "Sessions" is important here. Contrary to certain claims, the Lost Sessions CD does not represent that Holy Grail of '60s aficionados and collectors: the elusive "lost album." What it is, though, should be plenty good enough for most fans of the era's music. The compilation pulls together recordings made during several trips to the recording studio by Eternity's Children between 1966 and 1972, and if the sum of the album doesn't necessarily trump its individual parts, The Lost Sessions is nevertheless a fascinating hodgepodge encompassing a couple different lineups of the group and at least twice as many interesting shifts in musical style. Roughly the first half of the album was recorded by the first, six-piece incarnation of the band, led by singer and keyboardist Bruce Blackman…

The band's third album for Reprise has its advocates among psychedelic cultists, but it really is a letdown when stacked against their previous two Reprise LPs, even if those LPs (particularly the second) were haphazard in their psychedelic-pop-folk-rock admixtures. When they play it straight, the songs are often average or even unmemorable, easy-going late-1960s L.A. rock. When they are obviously trying to be strange, as on the title cut, it sounds contrived, and if you've heard the previous Reprise LPs already, Bob Markley's occasional deranged rants will be old hat. The minute-and-a-half "Anniversary of World War III" is entirely silent: a radical notion for a rock album of the time, perhaps, but something that had already been done by John Cage. There are some pleasing moments here and there, like the melancholy folk-rock ballad "Eighteen Is Over the Hill"…

The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, no strangers to weirdness on their prior 1967 album Part One, had still often stuck to relatively straightforward, concise, and pop-flavored songs on that LP. Here they stretched out into less structured, more avowedly psychedelic (and indeed experimental) territory, with mixed results. "Smell of Incense" (covered for a small hit by Southwest FOB) was sublime psych-pop. Yet "Suppose They Give a War and No One Comes" was just some fool - actually the band's chief investor, lyricist, and tambourine player, Bob Markley - grafting silly, self-consciously freaky recitation of a vintage 1936 Franklin Roosevelt speech onto an ominous fuzz guitar backup. Other cuts like "In the Arena" and "Overture - WCPAEB Part II" were free-form psychedelic creepiness without the strong content of, say, likely influence Frank Zappa…