H.P. LOVECRAFT

I'm much less impressed with this album than I'd like to be. The crux of the issue is that HP Lovecraft were legendary for having an eerie, mystical sound...honestly, I don't hear it. What we have is a bunch of fairly well- done folk-rock/early psych covers and a couple of originals. There nothing particularly psychedelic about songs by Fred Neil, a rootsy folk, or Let's Get Together, a song that was already cliched in the late 60s. The album has a nice, reverby sound like most early psych albums, which I do enjoy, but the material is mostly anything but surreal. There is a very good Jefferson Airplanish vocal blend between the two lead vocalists...in fact, Surrealistic Pillow or Jefferson Airplane Takes Off are excellent points of reference for this album. It's particularly frustrating for me, because only on the track "White Ship" do I find the band's reputation to be justified. This song has all the surreal, ominous atmosphere that I was led to expect by reading numerous reviews of the band's work. I wish they had pursued more of this and less unfocussed experiments like the lounge jazz of "That's How Much I Love you Baby" or the old timey "Time Machine". A decent psych album with an overblown reputation that doesn't really conjure the atmosphere of HP Lovecraft, the author, at all.