The Search Party - Montgomery Chapel 1969

There were many psychedelic albums like this issued in small press runs in the late '60s: folky, bittersweet melodies that tilted toward the downright sad and melancholy; high-strident female vocals sharing duties with less memorable, more normal-sounding male singing; a studied over-seriousness to the vocal delivery; a naïve, questing for the meaning of life tone to the compositions; and organ residing in a halfway house between the LSD trip and the mortuary. Even if you take it as a given that most of these albums have a dated pretentiousness that many would poke fun at, however, this is certainly one of the better such efforts in this mini-genre and possessed of some real musical appeal in spite of its considerable flaws. Most of the arrangements have an understated, effective (if somewhat creepy) eeriness. Songs like "Speak to Me," "Renee Child," "Poem By George Hall," and "The Decidedly Short Epic of Mr. Alvira" are good time-capsule mood pieces in their evocative otherworldliness, at times sounding a little like a psychedelic seance. Although the brief liner notes do intimate that the musicians were "trying to produce relevant, religious music," any religious overtones are pretty subtle. As often happened with bands whose strengths lay in these approaches, they tend to lose much of their charm when they try to rock out, piling on too many gimmicky, clichéd fuzz guitar riffs. And even one of the gentler numbers, "All But This," is too uncomfortably close to Jefferson Airplane's "Comin' Back to Me" to merit praise. It's a worthwhile obscurity if you go for this sort of thing in a big way, though, and has more concision than most projects of the sort, with just one of the cuts (the nine-minute "So Many Things Have Got Me Down") lasting more than five minutes. AMG.

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