Review by Richie Unterberger [-] The Mexican Kaleidoscopes sole, self-titled album is like many American 67-68 psych-garage obscurities in its morose, frequently minor-keyed blend of ominous organ and fuzz guitars. Yet mucho eccentricity and spontaneity make it more interesting than many such relics. That organ really vibrates with a menace, sometimes like a distant cousin to the Doors, but with a more adolescent, untutored sensibility. Although the vocals (all in English) are often lovelorn laments, they drip with snarling attitude veering from dont-give-a-damn bluesiness to abject self-pity, mixing in a psychedelic sense of disorientation that sets the songs aside from the more conventional romantic lyrics of earlier mid-60s garage bands. And some goofy psychedelic touches appear without warning, like the cheap outer space signals in Colours; the Harpo Marx-like horn interjections in the same tune; the atomic explosion that ends Hang Out; the out-of-nowhere distant, cornered-wolf yells of A New Man; the weird, slightly off-key plunks of I Think Its All Right, which ring like a tapped wine glass; and the funk rock guitar of Im Crazy, which sounds halfway between a chicken-scratch and a drawer being opened and closed, giving way to a harem organ. Then theres the eight-minute Once Upon a Time There Was a World, which sounds like an unwitting parody of suicidal teenage angst in its over-the-top sorrow for itself, yet backed with a creepy organ-fuzz arrangement of almost funereal grandeur.
Posted on: Sat, 13 Dec 2014 10:56:36 +0000
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