Harumi "Hunters of Heaven"

The wonderful Swedish psych band Dungen's new record finally arrived in my ears a day or two ago, which normally would have caused much excitement for my head. However, it came to me the same time as Harumi, a re-released curio from the first psych era, distinguishable from many of its contemporarires by two factors: its producer (Tom Wilson, also of VU, Dylan, S&G), and the ethnicity of its creators (if you haven't guessed by the title or album cover, Japanese). And listening to these two records within close proximity to one another, I'm pretty sure, has only heightened my appreciation of both. You see, Dungen's aesthetic has become clear to me now: they're so clearly influenced by Harumi's sort of psychedelic music, i.e. sure it's folky and acidic and experimental, but more importantly, its cultural currency is largely based on unavailability and subsequent aura-acquisition. And this is the same sort of feeling that Dungen has (largely successfully) mined thus far: an anonymous psych-folk mind-meld as potent because of its mysteriousness as its (often v. good) songwriting. Mmkay, back to Harumi right quick. The band wheels through a variety of styles on its only album, but hits a stride 2/3 of the way through, starting with "Hunters of Heaven" (mp3), which revs up and passionately delivers an arsenal of organs, violins and trumpets, in the interest of getting its Orion on.

Harumi is being reissued by Fallout. Buy it from Soundlink here.

ALSO: Speaking of 12th-wave psychedelia, if you're in the central/southern Indiana area, you should come out to Landlocked Music tonight at 8pm (if not earlier) for Brightblack Morning Light, a band I've been eagerly anticipating seeing live for some time now. I wrote them up here (the mp3 is reupped too).

ELSEWHERE: If you want to hear John Cale's jowly dismemberment and fun-ectomy of LCD Soundsystem's "All My Friends" (me on same), then go here.

BUT WAIT: Go to Idolator to grab Franz Ferdinand's cover of same (huh, strange), that properly highlights the New Order-ishness of the whole affair.

Terry Manning "One After 909"

The fact that a guy like Terry Manning even got to release his own album, let alone on Stax, testifies to the unique state of the record industry in the late Sixties and early Seventies, where smaller, subsidiary labels could be headed by iconoclasts looking to diversify their rosters and take chances on relative unknowns. Stax was in such a position in 1968 and 1969. They had made a name for themselves as the grittier, more soulful Motown, but their most successful artist was a group of white kids from Memphis called the Box Tops (“The Letter,” “Cry Like a Baby,” you know who I’m talking about). Manning engineered many of their sessions, and one day hopped on the mic and recorded a piss-take of the song “Choo-Choo Train,” which was slated to be recorded by the band that day. Turns out that Al Bell, the VP of Stax, actually liked it, and signed Manning to a one-record deal. Although he was a pretty talented multi-instrumentalist (he played all of the instruments on Home Sweet Home, save for some guitar work from Chris Bell, later of Big Star), he was far from a songwriter or singer, so what the album turned out to be is a collection of super-strange sounding soul cover versions, produced with the utmost clarity. The record opens with a simply bizarre psych-soul reimagining of “Savoy Truffle” that actually gets at the darker elements of the song by eliminating the Blood, Sweat and Tears horn charts from the original. But the best song on Home Sweet Home is one that’s only available on the re-release; a cover of the Beatles’ “One After 909” (mp3) recorded before the Beatles had a chance to do it. Apparently, Manning got a hold of a demo of the song because he was also a scenester and could do things like that. His version, while not necessarily better than the one that would end up on Let it Be (although maybe), is certainly of a different stripe. Manning disguises the fact that he can’t sing a lick by trying on a proto-psychobilly twang that sounds like an overwrought amateur Roy Orbison (which I suppose would make him the Big Bopper), but it’s the song’s production, Manning’s true talent, that makes it swing like the Beatles’ version couldn’t, and perhaps didn't want to. Listen to how the electric piano melds perfectly with the lead guitar lines, and how great the solo sounds on the lead break. It’s pretty sweet. The rest of the record is just like this—the sound of a strange, weird talent who took advantage of his one chance to come from behind the boards.

Home Sweet Home comes out November 7 on Sunbeam Records.

Robert Callender "Vincent Van Gogh"

Robert Callender is one of those underexposed batty rock enigmas that collectors and archivists go nuts over. He was a marginal 1960s songwriter and DJ before releasing two high-concept/low sales psych records, Rainbow and The Way (First Book of Experiences) (both of which were, well, of their time) and then disappearing---destined to be a dusty vinyl footnote. But in the manner one might expect a story like Callender's to work itself out, there started a mill of rumors a decade or so ago about a "lost" record he'd released in the early 1970s, but only in Holland. It turned out to be true, it's called (ahem) Le Musée de L'Impressionisme, and Fallout Records has remastered and reissued it. It's a relic, to be sure; the sort of sprawling, pseudo-intellectual opus that could have only come from a psychedelic veteran during the halcyon days of early 1970s conceptual-soul. Divided into two "stages" (etages, sorry), it's the equivalent of an aural tour through one of those huge coffee table art books, only led by a dude obsessed with Curtis Mayfield but sounding like David Clayton-Thomas from Blood, Sweat and Tears. Yeah, it's like that. And I love it. Especially "Vincent Van Gogh" (mp3) from the end of the second etage. The lyrics are priceless, approaching the painter's life in the manner of "Freddie's Dead," but with a bit more fatherly condescenscion. Callender refers to Van Gogh as "little man" (running wild?), and speaks to him as follows: "Little did you know when your time occurred, you'd become an invalid," "alcohol didn't do you no good," and something like "how you able to paint the world you live in, miraculous as you did" before lapsing into French, and then vamping for a while about Toulouse-Lautrec. If that doesn't pique your interest, you've already stopped reading anyway.

Buy Le Musee de L'Impressionisme from Forced Exposure.