Art - Supernaturally Fairy Tales 1967

Art were the psychedelic halfway house between the V.I.P.s, the soul- and R&B-rock group they evolved from, and Spooky Tooth, the much more famous progressive rock group that Art evolved into in the late 1960s. Art did one album for Island at the end of 1967, Supernatural Fairy Tales, produced by Guy Stevens, and indeed it's almost exactly at the midpoint between British R&B-soul-rock and British prog. Actually it's not too much different from early Spooky Tooth, except that the material's a little more psych- and pop-oriented. It's fair, though not great, psychedelia that's most effective when the vocals are sullen and the melodies haunting. 
Patchy but occasionally worthwhile British psychedelia, particularly when it's on the brooding side of that sub-genre. The heavy guitars and organ put this on the path to progressive rock, but the songs are rather more on the straightforward and popish side than those that Spooky Tooth would play when Art evolved into that group. "I Think I'm Going Weird" points to the morbid streak that would become sharper in Spooky Tooth; "African Thing," with its long African-styled drum solo, is the sort of strange, at least by the standards of 1967, item that groups would throw in to show they weren't limiting themselves to traditional rock forms anymore; "Come On Up" is almost a soul-rocker throwback to the V.I.P.s days; and the title track, with its mellotrons, is as close as Art got to the trippy baroque/whimsical mood that blew through so much British psychedelia in 1967 and 1968. The album has been reissued on CD by Edsel.

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