Booker T. and the M.G.s - McLemore Avenue
Both before and after the IABD show, we ended up listening to this album at least a few times. The MGs sort of do their jazzy, instrumental take on Beatles (and really this was happening a bunch around this time) songs, rearranging them and sometimes lining them up in suites. It’s actually quite a joy to listen to how they do this and the arrangements and segues were often very ear catching and caused us to constantly remark “Is that Booker T still?” Maybe it’s because they never play coy with it, litter it with cheesy strings and show that they put some genuine thought to what they did. It all adds up to one of the most impressive Beatles tributes ever, right down to the cover.
Kansas - Masque
I remarked recently how much I enjoyed the first Kansas album upon revisiting. I probably meant to go onto Song for America next as that’s their second, but never did the research to sort out the two 1975 albums and ended up with Masque, which definitely shows them starting to reach into more commercial and arena-friendly regions of music, none of which do a damn thing for me. While there’s still more obviously proggy numbers like the closer “The Pinnacle,” the album opens with a couple fairly banal single attempts, which if you look at them in historic perspective were just practice for albums like Leftoverture, the sort of songs that made them veritable stars. My issue is this all gets a bit too foofy and saccharine sweet at times, usually due to the incessant melodrama. Even when I was more symph-friendly this sort of thing made me uncomfortable, although my feelings in this direction are balanced by the appreciation for the talent on display here.
La Cofradia de la Flor Solar s/t
Like many non-English speaking countries, the psychedelic movement came a year or two late to Argentina and even if it didn’t have quite the success it did in Brazil via tropicalia, there are the occasional entries like this one for the listening which portrays a young hippie rock band in their infancy stage, spinning out short fuzzy psych tracks whose influences still well outweigh any sort of indepedent statement. Of course with the territory goes that incredible sense of naivete and anything goes, although I find this to be intensified more when a group tries to stretch their boundaries, something not at all happening on this debut record. So this is likely to appeal to psych collectors and those alone, while I enjoyed the listen it sounds like 1 in a 100 to my ears.