CAMEMBERT ELECTRIQUE

The first truly top-flight Gong album - really, the first top-flight album of Daevid Allen's career - might not quite have the epic, spacey passages brought to the table by Steve Hillage in future albums, but otherwise sees the band's classic sound firmly in place and firing all cylinders. The songs range from mildly updated psychedelia such as You Can't Kill Me, a hippy protest song spiced up with some killer sax from Didier Malherbe, to incredibly ahead-of-its-time material like You Tried So Hard - which, with its driving guitar line and earnest vocals, sounds in its first half like the sort of material the shoegazer/indie scene in Britain would cook up decades later, before the song breaks out into all kinds of experimental directions. The band's quirky sense of humour is in full force, and exists in perfect balance with its progressive musical aims - a fact that's true of precious few Gong albums from the early 1970s - so it's one of the absolute best places to start exploring the band's work.