Outer Music Diary

Traffic Sound - Tibet’s Suzettes (aka Traffic Sound) - Peru 1970

Can you say: “Ahhh, YES!”… ? You will, easily, after a taste of this calculated trip down lysergia lane - bumping down the road of certain sometime pre-Canterburian realms on another faraway continent fully intermingled with several psychedelic guns set on “stun.” Reverb, delectably melodious vocals (with periodic harmonizing), zoot flute, acid guitar lines, rumbling syncopation, saxophone squalls, chugging organ, and that about says it all. Fills and solidly bubbling bass get the listener’s shoulders on a zig-zag course to mesmerized genuflection. What’s missing? Nothing. Exactly why don’t you have this yet? Because you don’t know that if you have not grit your teeth to this, all you have is done is begun to realize that you’ve been gumming it.

Outcome:

Chugging, just get some.
You could not be disappointed, not in this lifetime, on this particular planet.

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::13/15 - A Classic.::

Tarkus - Peru 1972

How to begin? And where to end up? This album is a smattering of heaviness in a tube of multicolored lights. The fair portion of this album would give early Black Sabbath a run for it’s candles in its ability to create a brooding and heady atmosphere of roughhouse bass spilling out all over the place where your brain gets tumbled into mushpie. Yet, be certain to not get confused, this is no one-trick Tarkus. Their weighty excursions are balanced with segues of dreamy psychedelia along the lines of the acid-folk axis. The last track takes this tack for its duration. Pretty strange (but somehow strangely apropos) to have such a brazenly woozy disposition also readily dappled in pixie dust as well. Mind you, the major portion of the record will make you smash your face into your dash, keyboard, coffee table, or whatever else is in front of you.. and you will thank them for it - the pleasure and joy in being able to headbang and play air-guitar from Mars all over your couched glory because you are one of the few, the proud, the elite ones that know what the heck Tarkus is (originally pressed in a Peruvian run of 50!) and like the fact that people hear it and immediately say: “Yo! What’s hairy spider with a mole is this!?!?” It is that arresting.

Outcome:

Well-deserved legend, has the ultimate underground vibe. More some people’s bag than others - it just depends on whether you say paper or plastic at the grocery store, or both, depending on the contents. Welcome to the land of brow-furrowed feigned screaming into your mirror, head-jabbing and wondering if you should really keep racing to the stereo to keep turning it up and replaying this amphetamine-fueled section, or that one, and that one, and that one, and that one, and that one, and that one, and: DAMN, I think I’m going to snap the back of this chair if I keep bobbing back and forth on it, wiggling silly fingers in front of my belly - like I could even keep up! Whoah, catch your breath.. do it again!

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::12/15 - Borderline Classic::

Socrates Drank the Conium - Greece 1972

The debut. A genesis of Greek rock-in-sounds. Same applies as below, so above. Heavy/hot. This one is better than that one. . .

Outcome:

Solid, good, classic sound - some effects, high-energy, rolling and tumbling, definitively ROCKING!

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::11/15 - Excellent::

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Socrates Drank the Conium - Taste of Conium - Greece 1972

Anywhere you read on this bad boy, the ripping 13-minute cover of ‘Satisfaction’ is bound to come up, well, simply because it is a shredder of a long-turning jam based on that composition. The album is rock, through and through, recorded cleanly and with enough blues bars in there on side two to light up the dark and seedy corners off of late 60’s L.A. Sunset Strip. It is an amazing thing to notice how crisp and clean the production is on this heavy slab artifact. A bit of gritty guitar comes in and out of the phases passing through - it’s fuzzy, but not fuzz guitar. In some ways, the album is too ’straight-ahead’ to be called psychedelic, except in the loosest sense of the descriptor. For fans of the classic rock bands that began to define an era: The Stones, Cream, Jimi Hendrix, and their ilk; were they from the UK or US, they would have been contenders right along with them, they’re that good. Big in the motherland, one of the top billers back in the Grecian heyday of the early 70’s. Exotic, no. In your face, yes.

Outcome:

Excellent execution, clean values over a dirty backdrop, rock-n-roll for a soul that feels.

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::10/15 - Very Good::
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Release/reissue notes - I have the new Anazitisi deluxe vinyl reissues of these and they area a beautiful package, to be sure, 180gm. vinyl, laminated covers, poster, inserts.. AND each has a killer 7-inch release, the sides of which, are even better than the album cuts!