TomorrowTomorrow
The history of British psychedelia begins in earnest with the UFO club in London, which nurtured the idiom and its accompanying scene from December of 1966 until October of 1967. Founded by underground political activist John Hopkins (aka "Hoppy") and music producer/impresario extraordinaire, Joe Boyd, UFO played frequent host to such seminal acts as Pink Floyd, the Soft Machine, and Procol Harum. Pink Floyd and the Soft Machine are obviously the most notable acts of the acts whose talents were cultivated at UFO, but in the early days of British psychedelia, a third act, Tomorrow, ranked alongside them. Though Tomorrow is now best known for the single "My White Bicycle" (which made the second Nuggets box set) and because its lead guitarist Steve Howe later graduated to notoriety with the band Yes, the group's self-titled 1968 LP is blast of addictive flower-power psych that deserves to be placed alongside The Piper at the Gates of Dawn and The Soft Machine as one of the definitive documents of the era. Closer to straight ahead pop music than either of those records, Tomorrow's lone full-length also holds up surprisingly well against much better known psych-lite classics such as Odessey and Oracle and Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake. "Colonel Brown" is almost Kinksian with its stately rhythms and pop classicist aesthetic whereas "Hallucinations" has a wonderful melody made all the better by its tight harmonies. Though it's filled with highlights such as these, Tomorrow is not hit or miss, but rather, consistently engaging; even the group's take on "Strawberry Fields Forever" is good enough to make Tomorrow worth a listen today.
To hear audio clips from Tomorrow, click here.
0 comments:
Post a Comment