Horacee Arnold - Tribe

Tales of the Exonerated Flea may be one of the better examples of early 70s “kosmigroov” fusion, with a legendary line up of many of the great players of the day. Tribe, Arnold’s previous album, had a far lesser, and basically deserved reputation of being a more textural and less flashy sort of record and did not follow Flea to reissue a few years ago. It reminds me in some ways of Pharoah Sander’s work of the time and Terumaso Hino’s Double Rainbow in that, if you look at it a certain way it’s like taking a look at the jazz rock genre from the perspective of Airto Moreira or Dom Um Romao, the percussionists who tended to add a lot of exotic feel to the music. The textures are rich and full of world sounds, but other than that there’s not a lot of excitement to be found here.

King Crimson - Earthbound

In the progressive rock genre and even in rock as a whole, it’s hard to find a more panned album than King Crimson’s trashy sounding first live album. It’s the sort of reputation that takes on a life of its own until you’re left thinking, yeah, Earthbound sucks, when what’s really being said is the sound quality sucks. After all how can one hear the opening version of 21st Century Schizoid Man here and not feel that it’s one of the most powerful versions ever recorded, the energy yanked up so hard it’s as if you can see the needles hit red as you listen to it? Sure Earthbound has 15 1/2 minutes of Groon, which is a bit too much (the band could definitely noodle when they had a mind to), but overall I found this to be pretty consistent across the map. Of course the Crimson collective has gone and released a lot better sounding material from the same time period, so in a way Earthbound is kind of obsolete, but I’d recommend checking it out again if you’d ever, like me, been down on it. To my ears this is solidifying as possibly my favorite era of the band when I wouldn’t have even considered it ten years ago.