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Hapshash and the Coloured Coat - Featuring the Human Host and the Heavy Metal Kids CD (album) cover

FEATURING THE HUMAN HOST AND THE HEAVY METAL KIDS

Hapshash and the Coloured Coat

 

Proto-Prog

2.83 | 19 ratings

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Sean Trane
Special Collaborator
Prog Folk
3 stars Strange team that managed to release this very whacked out debut album that was quite ahead of its time, musically speaking. This group was a trio, and by hearing the album and its out-of-this-world psych, you'd guess they'd be at least a quintet. These guys were first and foremost counterculture multi-talented artistes, creating clothes and poster and album artworks in the heydays of the counter culture. Of the three "musicians", only one had any prior experience before recording this record, Guy Stevens, an Island record producer; the other two being just shop owners, returning to their shop activities after this freak out. Self-produced (by Guy Stevens) and "self-artworked" (meaning the decorated their sleeves themselves), this album is one of the stranger psychedelic albums of the British Isles, and given the un-experience of two of its members, this album is worthy of inclusion for that fact alone.

If you can picture Captain Beefheart's long musical delirium and add some of Can's lengthy groovy lunacy, you got a good idea of what this band's like. There is an acoustic side to the band that may induce into thinking of folk, but I tend to think of blues or even slightly country music (Dylan had released his John Wesley Harding album). The idea was to create an LSD trip opera (well it was certainly not higher culture results) including female orgasmic jolts on the 16-mins Empire Of The Sun.

Some claim the album has not aged well, as it seems like it was only hippy-dippy mumbo-jumbo, but inn regards with future albums to come this album has some prophetic qualities, announcing Can. While not exactly essential, this is the type of album that was extremely constructive to the scene, even if most music critics discarded it as junk, back then as they still do nowadays. I beg to differ, but it still won't make this album essential.

Sean Trane | 3/5 |

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