MAGICK BROTHER

I'm Happy, I'm not happy, I'm sad....I'm not sad.... I think a lot of people remembers "The Witch" spelling these words in "Angel's Egg". Before coming to this album I didn't know that they were already been used on "Pretty Miss Titty".

So while I was expecting what somebody has called "Proto-Gong", I've been pleasantly surprised to hear this, maybe sour, full Gong album.

Yes, it has pure psychedelic moments perfectly in line with the London's summer of love, ,with sounds that can even remind to the early Barrett with a hint of Beatles, but first of all the great inventive and the jazzy weirdness of Daevid Allen.

We pass from the acid guitar and violin of "Glad To Say To Say" with the vocal line reminding to Who, Beatles and Pink Floyd at the same time, to the fantastic closer "Cos You Got Green Hair" and its flute that contains already all the kind of goods that can be found across the Radio Gnome Trilogy.

So there are two keys to access this album: a prelude to Radio Gnome and a link between the 60s late psychedelia and the Canterbury genre. The genius of Daevid Allen has already started actually to transform the hippy-trippy psychedelic standards into something new and different.

An album very innovative, with noisy unstructured avantgarde tracks like "Little Sister" followed by a country/psych song like "Change The World". Even a Floyd fan like me would regret thinking that this Gong would have probably been more appropriate to comment Zabriskie Point, apart of C'mon Number 59, of course.

This album is full of ideas, some of them abandoned later, or not developed, but this is normal in a debut. I find it excellent and deserving 4 stars