The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band Vol 2

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…

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"…