Private
(BTT)
Brian
Gladstone
: Psychedelic Pholk Psongs (Can,2001)*°
Now this
is a difficult one. First of all the cd starts with a humoristic insane
naïve stupid long hair hippie cowboy song. The finger picking is, as
well as on the second track very fast and well crafted, reminding the
banjo. With "Flashing before my eyes" I think : "if
Clive
Palmer
was a cowboy it might have sounded like this". Ragtime like humour can
be find on "I like me", with fast blues chords, fingerpicking and some
kazoo. Most of the tracks first to be followed are nice psychedelic folk
songs (male/female duo, acoustic guitar, some flute,..) and they sound
exactly like we, collectors of psychedelic folk would like to hear. It
was confusing to hear these differences at first hearing but after
repeated listens I had much less difficulties with these contradictory
inspirations. Brian plays the guitar well and he has good ideas. On the
few solo guitar tracks his style seems to be a combination of folk
fingerpicking / blues and ragtime. The second half of the cd combines
often the style of the psychedelic folk with a more boring stoned way of
singing country folk songs as lullabies for stoned hippies or nursery
rhimes for the mentally insane. Luckily most of this is still drenched
with spacecakehumour.
I once
heard another so called psychedelic ssw so called collector item
influenced by country :
Peter
Grudzien
with "Unicorn".
That one contains incredibly bad ssw and singing, so bad that it becomes
almost unique and very enjoyable, but then for me still within the
category of humour. Country is often used as genre to express by so many
mediocre artists. Brian Gladstone however who definably has some country
influences at a few more tracks succeeds to be enjoayable even there.
That means that the second cowboy song "Cowboy of the West" and the
blues song (I mostly hate blues too) I am able to accept after a few
hearings within this concept. Only the long track "The highway man" is
somewhat boring. Some of it need a bit more time to get into, another
part is more easily appreciated.
