Tsuma Futari 1967

Tangerine Dream (1967). Tangerine Dream probably has the edge as the best of this British psychedelic group's two albums, but not by much. A long sought-after psychedelic rarity, it includes several of Kaleidoscope's best songs: "Flight from Ashiya," "Dive into Yesterday," "The Murder of Lewis Tollani," and especially the fragile ballad "Please Excuse My Face."
Faintly Blowing (1969). For their second album, Kaleidoscope delivered something an awful lot like their debut, a body of pleasant, trippy, spacy raga-rock, with the main difference that they pushed the wattage a little harder on their instruments - they'd also been performing pretty extensively by the time of their second long-player, and a lot of the music here was material that they'd worked out on-stage in very solid versions…

The Chocolate Watchband's debut album, No Way Out was also their most heavily Rolling Stones-influenced album, but appreciating the album and what's on it (and what's not) requires some explanation. Released in September of 1967, No Way Out came at the end of the band's first 15 months of existence, a period that encompassed the recording and release of four singles of generally extraordinary quality, and as good as anything heard from any garage band anywhere during that period…

A spotty but basically worthwhile three-disc set, Collectables' 1966-1967 Unreleased Masters Collection scours the International Artists vault for previously unreleased songs, alternate takes, rehearsals, and demos of songs that appeared on The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators and Easter Everywhere, and a couple of live cuts for good measure…

Esoteric Recordings are proud to announce the release of a newly re-mastered and expanded edition of the classic 1968 self-titled debut album by Procol Harum. Released in January 1968, the record followed on from the huge international success of the band's debut single A Whiter Shade of Pale and the follow up single Homburg. One of the finest releases of the era Procol Harum captured the exquisite song writing of Gary Brooker and Keith Reid and the excellence of the musicians in the group, namely Gary Brooker (voice, piano), Robin Trower (lead guitar), David Knights (bass guitar), B.J. Wilson (drums) and Matthew Fisher (Hammond organ). The overall result was a collection of songs that would prove to be truly ground breaking, despite only having being released in Mono at the insistence of producer Denny Cordell…

Procol Harum's debut album is amazingly engaging, considering that it was rushed out to capitalize on the hit title track. The material was all already written (before the hit, in fact), but the group recorded the LP in just two days, simply to get a long-player out, and came up with one of the more pleasingly straightforward releases in their history. The range of sounds here is the widest ever heard on one of the group's albums – "A Christmas Camel" isn't that far from the old Paramounts, the group tackling a sound inspired by Bob Dylan (and derived specifically from his "Ballad of a Thin Man"), while "Salad Days" and "Kaleidoscope" are hard-driven psychedelic rockers, stripped down to the basics, with no pretensions.

Esoteric Recordings are proud to announce the release of a newly re-mastered and expanded edition of the classic 1968 self-titled debut album by Procol Harum. Released in January 1968, the record followed on from the huge international success of the band's debut single A Whiter Shade of Pale and the follow up single Homburg. One of the finest releases of the era Procol Harum captured the exquisite song writing of Gary Brooker and Keith Reid and the excellence of the musicians in the group, namely Gary Brooker (voice, piano), Robin Trower (lead guitar), David Knights (bass guitar), B.J. Wilson (drums) and Matthew Fisher (Hammond organ). The overall result was a collection of songs that would prove to be truly ground breaking, despite only having being released in Mono at the insistence of producer Denny Cordell…