Customer Reviews

Chamaleon Church

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

A must for fans of bands like The Left Banke and The Zombies

Psychedelia that will heal your heart and make you smile

Don't let this amazing album be forgetten

The more I listen to this CD the more obsessed I become. It truly is an all-time classic - the music trippy & warm...the lyrics are just brilliant and very wise & kind. The album is kind of a sonic mixture of The Left Banke's THE LEFT BANKE TOO (one of the lead singers even sounds a lot like The Left Banke's George Cameron who sang lead on "Goodbye Holly" and "Bryant Hotel") and The Byrds' NOTORIOUS BYRD BROTHERS, and, of course, The Beatles. Order this right away! My favorite tracks are "Remembering's All I Can Do" and "In A Kindly Way" Both georgeous and heartbreaking.

Baroque/psychedelic pop-rock [from Boston] usually orbiting somewhere between the Left Banke, Spanky & Our Gang [and the Association . . . in their better moments]. There are even ample helpings from a palate very similar to parts of Circus Maximus' 'Neverland' album . . . most particularly several rhythmic/melodic figures on track #6, which are, even if derivative, more at paraphrase than direct quotation, and very skillfully wrought. Then again, I'm not really sure who came first.

The musical space is pretty light and airy in general, with a lot of reverb/echo in spots; the harmony vocals tend toward a somewhat unearthly ambience, though clearly of a friendly sort. Very conversational, given the strong dosage of counter-cultural rhetoric; these guys are very believable, all their sweetness notwithstanding. Emotional closeness and intermittent glimpses of imaginative distance cohere in a sort of magical blend.

They introduce one into the new agenda of 'the times' [c. 1968] without at all being threatening or arrogant, so you can ease on in. In other words, we've got a grouping of pretty compassionate souls here, not ego-drenched self-referring proselytizers. They get their message across by allowing one to become part of the experience, without forcing.

The singing is uniformly gorgeous, as is the playing and the overall mix, with one and only one caveat: sometimes it's difficult to hear what words are being sung. This is partly due to two factors, both of which, strangely enough, work to enhance the quality of Chamaeleon Church's overall sound: these are the density of the arrangement of the vocal harmonies, and the amount of the reverberation in the mix.