Kaleidoscope - Kaleidoscope (Mexico 1968)
Dreams, Fantasies and Nightmares reads:
A highly-regarded Mexican garage-psych album. Originally only two-hundred copies were pressed, back in 1969. This was probably the result of a one-off deal with Orfeon to see if the Mexican public could latch on to the new sounds. Unfortunately, they didn't, so the record was never pressed at the time in large quantities.
Thanks to its recent limited edition reissue, you can hear this album again in all its glory without taking out a second mortgage and you shouldn't be disappointed. All the lyrics are in English. The best tracks are Hang Out, a garage-punker with a fine organ intro and some sound effects; P.S. Come Back, an uptempo, organ-led, garage punker, Let Me Try, featuring more great garage organ which builds into a climax; Colours, (possibly its magnum opus) with superb whispered vocals, guitar / organ interplay and sound effects and the lengthier Once Upon A Time There Was A World, which features longer periods of guitar / organ interplay and a (spoken) vocal style similar to California's Maze. Recommended.
Colours can also be heard on Love, Peace And Poetry: Latin American Psychedelic Music.
All Music reads:
No relation to bands of the same name from California or from England, this Kaleidoscope was Mexican, though like the other two bands, they also operated in the late 1960s. Their sole album (sung completely in English) was a pretty fair, if pretty typical piece of garage rock-psychedelia, heavy on thick vibrating organ, fuzz guitar, and surly vocals. The album sounds very much like a soundtrack to a circa-'67 psychsploitation flick, but with a better band than most such films enlisted, with some unpredictable wacky effects and lead vocals (only betraying faint foreign accents) affecting a nonchalant cockiness. It's been reported that just a couple hundred copies of the LP were pressed when it first came out, and though it was reissued on La Ciruela Electrica, that was a limited edition of only 600 copies.
The Mexican Kaleidoscope's sole, self-titled album is like many American '67-'68 psych-garage obscurities in its morose, frequently minor-keyed blend of ominous organ and fuzz guitars. Yet mucho eccentricity and spontaneity make it more interesting than many such relics. That organ really vibrates with a menace, sometimes like a distant cousin to the Doors, but with a more adolescent, untutored sensibility. Although the vocals (all in English) are often lovelorn laments, they drip with snarling attitude veering from don't-give-a-damn bluesiness to abject self-pity, mixing in a psychedelic sense of disorientation that sets the songs aside from the more conventional romantic lyrics of earlier mid-'60s garage bands. And some goofy psychedelic touches appear without warning, like the cheap outer space signals in "Colours"; the Harpo Marx-like horn interjections in the same tune; the atomic explosion that ends "Hang Out"; the out-of-nowhere distant, cornered-wolf yells of "A New Man"; the weird, slightly off-key plunks of "I Think It's All Right," which ring like a tapped wine glass; and the funk rock guitar of "I'm Crazy," which sounds halfway between a chicken-scratch and a drawer being opened and closed, giving way to a harem organ. Then there's the eight-minute "Once Upon a Time There Was a World," which sounds like an unwitting parody of suicidal teenage angst in its over-the-top sorrow for itself, yet backed with a creepy organ-fuzz arrangement of almost funereal grandeur.
Tracklist:
01. Hang Out
02. P.S. Come Back
03. A Hole In My Life
04. Let Me Try
05. I Think It's All Right
06. Colours
07. Once Upon A Time There Was A World
08. A New Man
09. I'm Crazy
10. I'm Here, He's Gone, She's Crying
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