MONEY DOESN'T MAKE IT

The first effort of the union between Mushroom and Daevid Allen is a collection of improvised music that evolved into a collection of songs thanks to the lyrics added by Daevid Allen. Those willing to listen to a typical "Gong meets Mushroom" record will be disappointed, because the music isn´t related at all to their funky fusion experiments and it sounds much darker, but also full of musical contrasts, humour and criticism.

From the funny "Money Doesn´t Make It", with its interesting hypnotic intro and a superb work on guitars, you know you are going to listen something very different of what you expected. The improvised nature of the record is clearer in songs like "Prince of the Sidewak Scooter", almost recitative at the beginning, but that turns into a jammy spacey song full of the typical guitar gliss, and "False Teacher", a delicate but really mysterious track, in which Erik Pearson´s flute gives it an eastern sound that will appear again in "Mullumbimby Mother", that reminds me some of the raga-like music they had previously played in their respective bands.

Unfortunately, from this time the rest of the songs seem to be only short sketches of what they had been playing in the studio (in a similar vein as Fred Frith´s "Speechless"). Although these are not obviously the best tracks of the record, they can give you an idea of what they had been playing and how they would sound like when pushing their music to the limit ("Cunning Style Construct", which really sounds like a free improvisation, and the joke of "Wedding Music", are great examples of their out-of-limits performance). The most remarkable songs are "Prof. Improbable´s Preambule", very experimental and with an acid flavour that sticks it hard in your mind, specially by the metronomic percussive sounds, and the crazy reprise of the first song, "Burn Your Money", which could be the perfect final for the record.

Despite not being a perfect record and having some flaws, the overall result is at a high level and I think it deserves a listen, noy only for the great musicianship displayed, but also because you can discover another side of this versatyle artist named Daevid Allen. I rate it with 4 stars.

Daevid Allen and the members of Mushroom got together to put out this space rock oddity. It starts out really strongly, with the New Wave-tinged title track featuring a Devo-esque backing and an uncharacteristically sinister vocal performance from Allen being the highlight of the album. Much of the rest of the material, however, finds itself stuck in a rut; at points, the band seem to be shuffling towards the bass-heavy and raw space rock sound of classic-era Hawkwind, and at other points there's nods to the whimsical psychedelia of early Gong, but they don't manage to put their hearts into either approach or successfully cross-fertilise the differing space rock strands involved to come up with something new. Though the opener might have some listeners hoping to hear a revitalised Allen, really this is more of the same sort of thing he'd been doing for decades up to this point.