Out-Sider 2019
When You Hear The Music, It’s Yours
Pun-loving Kentucky collective dust off their unreleased album to share it with the masses.
Lexington was an unlikely locale for a garage-psych group, yet that’s where ONE OF HOURS started to shake and move from 1966 onward – to issue two singles, change name to DANDELION WINE and vanish. Or so it seemed – because they managed to lay down an LP two years later which didn’t see the light of day, and even its master tape perished in a warehouse fire. Luckily, a first generation copy survived – and now “When You Hear The Music, It’s Yours” has finally made it out of darkness. A dozen tracks linked by snippets of dialogue and ambient noises, reflecting the band’s studio disposition, the album is quite alluring, although the songs’ status will hardly progress from “curio” to “cult” after the disc has been spun.
There’s grandeur, though, to the title track’s classical piano – the momentum undermined once Shawn Foreman and his colleagues burst from baroque into barroom harmonies and go back to solemnity – only to bare their harder edge on “Mother Said” where Bob Willcutt’s acid-kissed six string shine, and evoke “Moonlight Sonata” on “Mary Jane Like A Woman” to stir emotions. Yet while “Two Heads For 35 Cents” feels creepily histrionic in its rave, as blues harp and organ wail in turns, “Cry” has heavier riffs to ram the piece’s point home., and “Within My Garden” is a polyphonic trip par excellence. And if “Kazoo Man” may sound innocent with a certain instrument woven in, the subliminal voices behind ” Incense C-19X” will drive the lesser listener mad, before the many tunes in “A Way To Leave At Last” show the ensemble’s prog potential – lost to the future and, thankfully, found now.
Inessential yet lovable.
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