Customer Reviews

Incredible String Band

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

 

 

This was the ISB's debut album, and a fine debut it was too. It should also be noted that, until the reunions of recent years, this was the only album to feature original member Clive Palmer; they split briefly after recording this album, and Palmer then travelled to Afghanistan. Robin Williamson went to Morocco for a time and returned with the bowed gimbri which would make its debut on their second album, The 5000 Spirits or the Layers of the Onion. But I digress...

This is quite different from most everything that followed, as Williamson and Heron weren't yet following their psychedelic muse. Yet the seeds of the later ISB material are planted here, with the eclectic mix of sounds in the opening cut "Maybe Someday" (or as the liner notes suggest, "She'll be Scottish, Bulgarian and schizophrenic"). For the most part, however, this is a fairly straight-ahead mix of British and American folk styles; Williamson's "October Song" is easily the best track on here, predicting "First Girl I Loved," and Heron's "The Tree" and "Everything's Fine Right Now" give us some insight into his style, also predicting "Chinese White" and "Painting Box" to some degree.

Clive Palmer contributes just one song himself, "Empty Pocket Blues." Since he wasn't heard from again for a long time, it's hard to know just how he would have progressed had he remained with the ISB, or even how he might have contributed to their developing sound. Would Williamson and Heron's psychedelic tendencies have been reigned in a bit? (Certainly that didn't happen when Rose and Licorice became contributing members, seeming instead to bolster their boyfriends' odd but engaging twists of creativity.)

However you view it, this is a good look at what might have been, and what was to be, mingling together on the same album. The remastering job is excellent. For more than just completists.

In my opinion, The Incredible String Band didn't become incredible until Williamson and Heron discovered psychadelia and recorded jems like "Chinese White", "The Eyes of Fate" and the entire Hangman's Beautiful Daughter LP. Their self-titled debut, in comparasson, is pretty much your garden variety British folk music with little of the imagination and eccentricity of their later work. Clive Palmer contributes one original number and some excellent banjo playing but seems more like a guest musician than a full fledged band member.

If early ISB material is what you crave, first check out the superior Chelsea Sessions 1967 CD featuring well-recorded demos of many of the songs that were later re-recorded for the 5000 Spirits LP that same year. Others may disagree, but I consider their debut to be for ISB completists only and not an essential recording.

The Incredible String Band is like a wind that might carry you to unusual unfamiliar places. Passage depends on your attitude, your aptitude (or lack there of) - vision, experiences past or future, reasoning, something or other/ what have you - to mingle with some of these clever musical woven webs in time and space.
Upon my first time listening to the first couple of tracks (the original release), I laid back - closed my eyes - and was inspired to this vision of a torso in the upper opening of a quaint exterior split Dutch doorway. There he was peering outward, the form of an ancient gentleman (I'm inclined to say Flemish) with scraggly thin long white beard and rather pointed worn teeth. He was wearing a wreath of ivy on his head as the music played on. In that same upper half split doorway next to him - shoulder to shoulder - was his companion reindeer, also wearing an ivy wreath on his head around his medium-short length antlers.
I had no particular reason - nor was I predisposed to imagine that scene - beyond this rather strange and fancy flowing music which carried my mind to this distant place and time. The music was colorful and I was enchanted being there before these two fascinating characters which seemed somehow connected with the music.
I was s-h-o-c-k-e-d when subsequently "The 5000 Spirits or Layers Of The Onion" was released with a picture on back of the album cover of Mike and Robin wearing wreaths on their heads!
Those things being true, I borrow the last lines from the Smoke Shoveling Song:
"Anyone telling a bigger story would have to be tellin a lie"
"Anyone thinkin a bigger one up'd have to be very high!"