Brown Acid: The Sixteenth Trip
Riding Easy Records
The flashbacks just won’t slow down! The obsessive music mavens at Riding Easy have unearthed another dime bag’s worth of new old-stock rock and roll. These songs date from the 1970s and somehow fell off the edit deck, rolled under the carpet, and sat out the next 50 years. The means they went from crispy new to vintage rust without ever moving my music needle.
Our first track is courtesy of The Seeds, a one-hit wonder better know for “Pushing too Hard.” The new track “Shuckin’ and Jivin’ leans on a more guitar-heavy sound, and it burns up the road. The torched vocals from Sky Saxon are a speed metal work out and the track runs a rather long seven minutes, but it gets your blood boiling. Next up we have “Freight Train” by Macbeth. This running of the bulls opens with a great flourish, and deep inside the music we hear exciting chord changes and a nearly punk vocal. You could argue that this an early punk tune; the only concern preventing that is the vocals are too clear and easy to understand.
Another fun track is the more funky Brotherhood of Peace with “Feel The Heat (In the Driver’s Seat).” There’s a wacka-wacka drum track and snarky male vocal, and it’s a slice of that funky sound you can just sort of dance to. I’ll leave you with one more sample: “Midnight in New York” by Clinton. It’s a zippy guitar piece with a vocal extolling the late night scene in the Big Apple. It’s a simple riff with a discrete back up chorus, and no real endpoint, just like the song says.
And that’s why I’m happy about this release. It’s the soundtrack to the party I never knew about until it was over and everyone had sobered up and gone home. I gotta set my alarm earlier.
