121. The United States Of America - The United States Of America (1968)




















Track Listing

1. The American Metaphysical Circus
2. Hard Coming Love
3. Cloud Song
4. The Garden Of Earthly Delights
5. I Won’t Leave My Wooden-Wife For You, Sugar
6. Where Is Yesterday
7. Coming Down
8. Love Song For The Dead Ché
9. Stranded In Time
10. The American Way Of Love

Review

The United States Of America! So, an album of rousing patriotic brass songs and Sousa marches. Well, in a way... There certainly are marches, and that is the first thing you hear when you turn on the album, followed by another one and another one, but they are just put on top of each other until you get an undistinct noise that then breaks up into a beautiful psychadelic track. And a band formed by a card-carrying Communist was far from what was considered patriotic in the 1960's.

This is an amazing album, imagine, a rock band without a guitarist! The whole album is brilliant, and it goes through so many different types of music, from ballads to heavy rock and even a song fully accompanied by strings in the style of Final Fantasy (not the game, the band). And in the end all the tracks are brilliantly mashed up into one single acid flashback of a last track.

So, this is an album I really had never heard of, had never listened to but now I feel I have been missing out on something amazing. Actually it is not a very famous album at all, but one which should be. The music is not at all that accessible at first, in fact nothing else would be expected from a student of John Cage. But it really is worth the initial effort. There is something of the Jefferson Airplane at times, but this is very much better, more experimental and more innovative.Buy it at Amazon UK or US

Track Highlights

1. Stranded In Time
2. Cloud Song
3. The American Metaphysical Circus
4. Hard Comin' Love

Final Grade

10/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

The USA were thanked by the triphop group Portishead in the liner notes of their 1997 album Portishead, for the song "Half Day Closing" which bears a more than superficial resemblance to "American Metaphysical Circus".

They have a MySpace account! Here! Notice friends list, Broadcast and Animal Collective among others...