Mushroom 1971 / Think Like A Key 2023
Death May Be Your Santa Claus
Bible black with all guns blazing: brilliant British band blasts their fable-bound album into eternity.
A three-year pause between longplay platters seemed like an unusual interval for the late ’60s and early ’70s, yet this collective needed such a gap to crystallize their perspective, revise their ranks, and create a record which, despite its music not celebrated as much as its title, made them cult heroes. The title in question, however, came from Frankie Dymon’s 1969 film that the youngsters composed a soundtrack for before reworking “Death May Be Your Santa Claus” in their signature style, where sound effects were as important as melodies, to wrap around the album and signal its conceptual doom ‘n’ gloom – rather tongue-in-cheek to render the results quite entertaining. If only the apocalyptic concept was simple…
While the organ-driven titular bookends suggest there’s an Armageddon afterparty going on, two of the cuts laid down during the recording sessions – the comical “Dip It Out Of The Bog Fred” and “Baby R U Anudder Monster” that are appended to this disc – felt disruptive enough for the platter’s dark theme to be left out, and when it got reissued in 1972, a few months down the line from the original release, it opened with the orchestrally augmented “Funeral”: another bonus track now, which, once set at the album’s start, turns its drift into an afterlife triumph. So even though the effervescent “Hangin’ On An Eyelid” unfurls a multilayered fantasy not unlike the one the group’s debut offered, Ken Elliott’s Mellotron and piano dictating the rhythm shifts and his brother Rob’s supple voice weaving a cosmic route around Kieran O’Connor’s imaginative drumming before sharp riffs emerge from the piece’s jive, the aggressively sexy “Somethin’ You Got” roars across a Latino-tinged groove. And whereas there’s infectious fury in the Hammond-heavy, baroque-tinctured epic “Lucifer And The Egg” embroidered with the progressive rumble of George Hart’s bass, the Bach-inspired “Cyclops” sculpts the equally spaced-out passages into a violin-violated symphonic edifice.
It’s imposing, what with the brief “Sic Transit Gloria Mundi” complying to musique concrète cinematics and the solemn “Revelations Ch 16 Vs 9-12” detailing this sonic imagery with delicious nuances, but “Take To The Skies” spikes it with a dream-evoking electronica – a tentative way out of the album’s arresting nightmare. Or reverie that the listener may not want to part with.
*****
