SKU
AVSCD036
Second album from this early Australian prog band featuring the stunning guitar work of Tim Gaze - before he split to form Khavas Jute. This one has been given the usual stunning treatment by Aztec Music. It's packed with bonus material and detailed liner notes. I hope they reissue the first album as well.
"Give some top-grade acid to a hard-rock band whose name means “The Ultimate End” and suddenly we’re no longer walking on sunshine, Katrina. Some of this sounds like hippies on a hell-bound train – a fitting soundtrack to coming down off the ’60s. Like all Lindsay Bjerre wanted to do was save some trees. And play guitar of course.
The guitar interplay between him and Tim Gaze is interplanetary. Twin guitars pigging out on a roast of ’70s classic rock styles. Gaze, a 16-year-old prodigy reminiscent of Salinger’s Glass kids, seems to have done his best work as a teenager. Here and on Kahvas Jute’s Wide Open, one of my favourite albums of the ’70s by anyone, he makes his guitar sing like a bird and breathe fire like a dragon.
The organ-spiked, tree-hugging title track chugs at warp speed; the bassist almost loses an arm. Bjerre sings the non-word “legisration” like it actually means something. According to the lyrics sheet he sings legislation, but I’m hearing it as legisration and that’s the final word on the matter.
Despite its skipability, ‘Heaven is Closed’, a nine-minute pitch to send our pretty faces straight to hell if we don’t wake up and smell the grease on the chainsaw (another save-the-trees pledge) seems crucial to the Goolutionites concept; an important ingredient to its prog Bolognese. ‘Stand in the Sunlight’ shares a guitar sound with an early Go-Betweens outtake, maybe it’s a chord structure, maybe not, but it’s worth mentioning (I think).
‘Bali Waters’ (an instrumental from the surf film From Morning of the Earth), one of four cuts performed live at The Regent and compiled here, finds the guitars bowing in deference to a bonkers flute solo. No report that the Regent rats came out of woodwork in hordes to honour thine flute mastery, but it truly is that calibre of hypnotic fluting that hath been wrought. The live boogie of ‘Being Absolutely Free’ sounds awfully dated now, but the solo, and I presume this is Gaze, shreds so hard the tune practically turns into ‘Free Bird’ and flies away! There’s plenty of charm too, such as ‘I Love You All’ plus two singles (‘I Got a Feeling’ and ‘My Father Told Me’) that will stay forever classy." - Shane Moritz/Mess And Noise
- Style:Progressive Rock
- Record Label:Aztec Music