Customer Reviews

Clear Blue Sky

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Listening to this spectacularly ignored 1970 offering with the benefit of hindsight, one could say that Clear Blue Sky were either visionary geniuses, or lucky amateurs who picked a good day to rent the studio. Barely out of high school, this guitar-driven (with the odd flute or organ) power trio delivers an inventive set of neo-prog pyschedelic blues-metal, despite the somewhat crude production and sloppy mix. In terms of thier contemporaries, the sound falls somewhere between the Groundhogs and Budgie; but the scary thing is that if you were to do a blindfold test with a room full of college students and tell them this was a new lo-fi alternative band...they would believe you! Just listen to the album's best track, "My Heaven", and tell me you couldn't pass it off as Swervedriver or The Bevis Frond! With the promising raw talent displayed, one wonders whatever became of these guys. Collector's note:Roger Dean did the album cover art!

SLOPPY, AMATEURISH, AND CRUDE. THAT'S NOT ALL I LIKE ABOUT IT. THESE GUYS ARE STILL LEARNING HOW TO PLAY THEIR INSTRUMENTS, AND APPARENTLY ARE ENJOYING THE RISKS. CRAZY LEAD GUITAR. JIMI WOULD BE PROUD. VERY SIMPLE, STRAIGHT AHEAD JAM. CATCHY TUNES WITH A PROGRESSIVE TINGE IN THE ARRANGEMENTS OF THE MUSIC. SOME OF THE BEST CHEAP GARAGE MUSIC EVER. MUSICIANSHIP ASIDE, THIS ALBUM IS AN EASY 5 STAR. LIKE FUZZ? GO FOR IT.

This is a great pick from the Vertigo catoluge. It is guitar rock, sometimes so unadulturated I doubt it was even mixed. The chord changes have some good twists and turns, so the music is never predictable. Some of the writting is so good that if you changed the production style, you would have a very polished pop rock album.

But the rawness is a real treat. The album reminds me of what Nirvana were doing on In Utero. Clear Blue Sky sounds suprisingly modern: they could pass for a grunge band from 1991.

Both garage rock and progressive rock fans will enjoy this.

when this lp was issued early 70's it was a confidential , but total surprise. 3 young talented fellows jamming a psychedelic & spatial hard rock . the picture describes perfectly the tune of their music .It is about sure that this LP was a strong influence for Pink Floyd's " Meddle " The original Lp is a Collector costing several 100 of $ .

This group was only around for this album when it was released in 1970. These three guys were in their late teens when they recorded this.Excellent guitar! Even the songs are tuneful throughout.This is just as heavy as Led Zeppelin or Black Sabbath but with a lean toward prog.Recommended!

For starters, this album is great! It has fuzz guitar, a bluesy, progressive sound and sometimes driving/sometimes choppy tunes...but you probably already know all that if you've reached this point of considering getting the japanese version.
I actually have a question for anyone who's actually purchased this japanese version already - does it too have the (what sounds like the master tape got eaten by a tape player, stretched out while trying to rewind it to the diameter of a piece of dental floss, then repressed into a normal piece of tape with a fingernail or something resulting in a loss of fidelity that lasts for about 20 seconds or so) that begins about 4 minutes into the track 'sweet leaf'? I put it across like that because I was not immune to my cassettes - or dare I say 8 tracks - getting eaten by my tape deck and ending up with the same sound as the tape got jammed and stretched out of shape as I rewound it!!!
I have both the repertoire copy and the akarma and they both have this sound defect in the same spot in that song (which I now know IS NOT a defect in the first copy I bought, repertoire, of this album.
Again, if you bought this japanese version of this cd album, please let all of us know since others that have arrived at this version are probably wondering like I am...

I stumbled onto this CD while searching for something else, and picked it up more out of curiosity than anything else. Hey, it's got a Roger Dean cover, an endorsement of sorts, right? Well... As an interesting bit of nostalgia Clear Blue Sky has its moments, but it's pretty obvious why they didn't cut another album or find themselves a noteworthy spot in the annals of early rock. It's not even so much that they were a bad band, rather that even as a psychedelic/progressive band they come across as ordinary and ever so derivative. Budgie, Blue Cheer, Dust, even Vanilla Fudge to some degree - Clear Blue Sky is an amalgam of these and whatever other bands they were soaking up at the time. If this is your thing, derivative and all, there are any number of bands who pulled off the same thing with results far superior to this pedestrian effort.