Spacious Mind - Live Volume One:  Do Your Thing But Don’t Touch Ours

One positive for the improvisationally minded space-rock/psych group is after a decade in the business, you’re going to likely have a good stock of live recordings and it shouldn’t be too difficult to start releasing some of the gems. Here the Spacious Mind have done that for their own audience in limited quantities, and it’s certainly a worthy first entry, marking this a series worth keeping an eye on. There aren’t any major secrets here, this is a genre that got started with Pink Floyd in the late 60s and while the technology has changed, the focus on mantric and psychedelic jams hasn’t. However, now that this band has been around for a while, I’m starting to see that divergence from the center that you’d hope for. The band does it by fragmenting parts of their sound and really concentrating on excellent textures, rather than concentrating on power or histrionics. It’s a similar path to the one Escapade took except Spacious Mind still seem a bit old school and analog.

Spirit - Spirit of ‘76

I’m like nearly everyone else in finding the first four Spirit albums the central part of the band’s canon, but even with the personnel changes, it didn’t make the band something not to watch for the remainder of the 70s as this double album so perfectly demonstrates. Or should I say bands? Randy California left Spirit in the early 70s and went on to record Kapt Kopter, which could be considered something of a template for the Spirit he picked up with to record this album, drummer Ed Cassidy partnering with him for a new version. Like Kapt Kopter, this album has a lot of reconstructed covers and while they don’t go to Residents-like lengths to make them different, there’s no question this is California and Co. even through “The Times They Are A-Changing,” “Like A Rolling Stone,” the Stones’ “Happy,” “Hey Joe” and more. The band’s original music, written by the partners, fits in perfectly, and it turns out to be something of a post-Beatles art/pop thing, like California’s solo work, all of it echoing the original music on albums like Sardonicus. It’s definitely a surreal, psychedelic, yet very American work that still deserves attention almost as much as the original music.

Keep - Live

Keep’s a hard jazz rock band to get a consonant view on, given their two studio albums and this live release as they seem to change style from one to the other, and I suppose that could be due to personnel changes invisible to me. I’ve always really liked the second album, because it works nicely as an analog to the Kenso albums, however, this Live album is more what you’d think of as standard fusion, more in the virtuoso realms of Tribal Tech and like. So while I didn’t warm to it right away, over time I’ve found it to improve distinctively from the others to make it my second favorite work of theirs. In getting used to the music, I still detect a little of the more progrock vibe from the second in the compositions even if it is subsumed to the new style a bit.