Customer Reviews

In Outer Space

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This cd makes me have a happy heart! Lucia Pamela is so crazy! Beautiful! The singing sounds weird not because it's a low-quality old recording but because there's a weird old-school analog reverb on all the vocals! & the things she sings about seem so strange because very rarely will you encounter anything so friendly! & innocuous! Yay! Plus, the band which is always plowing jazzily away behind the singing is so together -- because it's all Lucia Pamela! The band & vocals seem to care about each other very little though, & wee! Dear meee, you are the sweetest thing, she says, & I agree! Listen to this, be liberated from convention, & have fun!

CD release of Lucia Pamela's ultra-rare 1969 self-recorded album. Pamela sounds like an inebriated Ethel Merman backed by a peyote-soaked klezmer band, with plenty of raw abandon and high spirits--the shortest distance between Sun Ra and the Shaggs. Includes the hits "Walking on the Moon" and "In the Year 2000." Booklet contains rare photos and inspiring life-story liner notes. Brain damage for the kiddies--beats any purple dinosaur!

...at least that what she thinks. I first heard Lucia Pamela's "Moontown" on one of the now sadly out-of-print RESearch Incredibly Strange Music volumes. Even though all of the tracks were, well, incredibly strange, Lucia Pamela stuck out head and shoulders above the rest. When I was able to track down this CD, I leapt at the opportunity, ordered it, and proceeded to either amuse or annoy all my friends with it. "Moontown" is a drop in the bucket compared to some of the other tracks. This woman is absolutely crackers and I love her. The bio included in the liner notes explains a lot about her that I simply did not know including the rumour that she performed all the instruments accompanying her. If you find a copy of her colouring book in an antiques shop or flea market, please contact me! She's still waiting for my entry in the colouring contest...

Lucia Pamela is a genius; that's all one can say. I mean, she managed to build her own rocket and tour the galaxies before recording this album on the moon (although she didn't like the acoustics.). Really, it's all in her NY Times Obit. This is one of the sweetest, funniest, and most original CDs you can own, in addition to showcasing the talents of a one of a kind artist. Buy immediately.

Imagine if Ethel Merman did a lot of tabs of acid, and I mean a lot. Than she began to have ultra-freaky hallucinations involving space and the outer planets. If that sounds as much like your idea of fun as it is for me, you'll be cracking up during this whole album. Either that or you'll be scared stiff for the fact it's one of the most unintentionally surrealistic and bizarre recordings in American history. If it doesn't sound like your idea of fun, well, you'll be screaming in pain yelling for it to be turned off. It's often hilariously cringe-worthy, yet it has a certain enthusiasm which in addition to it's bizarre concept has made it one of the most popular albums amound outsider music fans for decades. Far and away the most bizarre concept album there is. Love it, hate it. Admit there's nothing else out there like it.

Lucia Pamela's one-off album "Into Outer Space with Lucia Pamela", I heard of from reading about The Shaggs, whose quirky, strangely beautiful primitivism was unique in its time and has never been nearly equalled by its many imitators.

"Into Outer Space with Lucia Pamela" is often grouped with the Shaggs' debut as "outside music", but it is really very different and has none of the qualities that made the Shaggs so good. She was a quite old (she does not say) woman at the time "Into Outer Space with Lucia Pamela" was recorded, and indeed much of the music on "Into Outer Space with Lucia Pamela" sounds like 1950s or 1940s jazz. The main instrument is the piano, with woodwinds and very low-in-the-mix drums providing the backing, and the tempos are very fast. However, this speed adds nothing to the music and often, as on the eleventh track "I've Got a Song", Pamela and her band sound like they are aiming to eliminate any sense of groove from the song, yet they fail to provide any melody to compensate.

More than that, the intros on the songs of "Into Outer Space with Lucia Pamela" really do not sound deep or serious. This is starkly evident from the first words of "Moontown" and where Pamela half seriously says "I see animals"/"I see moon people". The shallowness gets even worse on second track "Walking on the Moon" where she in a voice that half-heartedly tries to imitate bird songs comes off as sounding like a pretentious child. Third track "Flip Flop Fly" is even more generic jazz with vocals that deliberately try to demolish the song's melody. Fourth track "Dear Me" goes even further in attempting to turn jazz into a more dramatic, complex form of music, but whilst one can admire Pamela's intent she simply does not have the talent that allowed Laura Nyro (say) to do that so perfectly on the contemporary New York Tendaberry. The result is that, whereas something like "Tendaberry" comes off uniquely powerful, Pamela comes across as merely echoey and unmemorable, whilst her music comes across as a replica of 1940s and 1950s jazz.

Fifth track "You and Your Big Ideas" is not even funny though Pamela laughs simply because of the absurdity of her Alaskan gold rush tale, whilst "What to Do Is the Question" is a basically sincere ballad but otherwise no different and "Hap-Hap-Happy Heart" moves further into more modern jazz whilst being absurdly silly even by the low standards of this album. "Indian Alphabet Chant" may have preceded The Soft Machine's effort to make a song out of alphabet recitation, but it lacks the intimacy of Wyatt's effort, and the rest of the songs here do not go beyond the screwed-up, but still generic, vocal jazz.

All in all, this is outsider music that really remains bad even if it was in a silly way calculated to not sound good. More than that, "Into Outer Space with Lucia Pamela" is muhc less original and more simply childish and shallow than you might hear.

I don't know how I got my hands on this CD. I was appalled that this beautiful mess could be released to the general public for a monitary charge. It truly belongs in a crater on the moon, where no one could hear it because the moon has no atmosphere to carry sound. No one obviously felt they could possible guide this woman to a half way successful career. I play these songs for my relatives and friends to make their teeth grind, otherwise, I consider it a masterpiece of the avant-guard. I have never given it a second listen, it might confirm what I heard the first time. Thank god it was left off the space ship carrying examples of man's greatest accomlplishment in Art, Music, Literature,etc. They would have passed up the Earth had "they" heard it. Amen.

I don't know what is more painful, popping your eardrums with an ice pic or listening to Lucia Pamela's Into Outer Space. Yes, I did buy it more out of curiousity than anything else. I won't do that again! Not only is the recording bad, (yes, I know it is an old recording) but the musical compositions are hideous. Who told this women she could sing? Thank goodness time and space separate us as to hear her in person would be analogous to chanting an unholy entreaty to the Old Ones a la an H.P. Lovecraft story. Save your money or invest it in something you know will give you a more fulfilling aural experience.