Friday, March 8, 2019

The Spacious Mind- The no. 4 or 5 Gravy Band (Essence Music)


It is always a nice surprise when some new TSM arrives. I decided to go for the deluxe version and wow..  Very rare you see such a packaging. The record comes in thick brown polished leather sleeve that the record slides into in a normal brown cardboard sleeve. Both have special holes so that pieces of the artwork are visible. There is a unique painting the size of an LP sleeve and a small pouch that contains a CD-R of extra music from the same session. This version is only in 99 copies on a orange vinyl with black speckles.


Side A starts with the 13 min track, The Cinnamon Tree. This is a very slow spacey track with drums, bass, guitars and keyboards. Reminds me of 1969 era Pink Floyd. You don’t know it but you Are is even slower and like a spaced out drone track, nearly.   Side B, is one long tracks and starts off in stark contrast to the mellow side A, with a very intense freakout! It slowly fades down into a hypnotic piece of music, that reminds me of some of the bands earliest material from the early 90s, where there is just some layers of strange sounds in the music as it glides along in it’s own psychedelic way. Later on a groove sort of like Riders on the Storm, kicks in and there is a really nice long wah guitar solo and the Fender Rhodes keeps the vibe spacey as the bass and drums just keep a killer groove going. The end is very spaced out, just as the record started out. 


The CD-R contains one 20min track broken into 4 parts called On The Fragmentary Marches of Bells, Greeks and Dolls. It starts very spaced out with two guitars searching, bass grumbling, organ churning, sounds and trees growing, the pains of the earth, the birth of the northern hemisphere, warding off danger, bright lights shimmering, and then...........   you know the rest... A band that is still trippy and magical!


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