The United States Of America
Album: The United States Of America
Label: Esoteric
Tracks: 10
Website: http://www.esotericrecordings.com/

This is brilliant! Simply far-out! It's an album that I'm sure many will have owned for well over 40 years without really understanding it. This latest CD reissue, courtesy of Esoteric, brings all its wonderful weirdness and arcane complexities into your brain with a splendid remastering that, while retaining the blindingly intense, piercing-treble-hallucinatory-distorted quality of the original, manages to attain within its grooves a clarity of perspective that's astounding - a clarity that I'd not noticed before. It also happens to deliver the most complete picture of the group's recordings - previous CD incarnations had given us the original album (Edsel, 1997) and just some of the original album plus rarity bonus cuts (Sundazed, 2004). This completeness is nothing less that it richly deserves, for It really is a unique record, the like of which had never been heard before or since - even considering the wild eclecticism of the era in which it was spawned and recorded.

The band was founded in 1967 by Joseph Byrd, a seasoned veteran of New York's avant-garde scene who had studied with John Cage and was a graduate of composition at Stanford University. He also espoused radical politics, so assumed - with disarmingly naivety - that he could bring any music he and his band members had hitherto been playing into the band's own music in order to get his message across, using the freewheeling experimentalism and the spirit of contemporary rock, a field of musical endeavour of which he had neither knowledge nor experience! Unlike Frank Zappa, for instance (the closest direct comparison perhaps), who unashamedly and deliberately provoked outrage and brought elements of Varèse and Stockhausen into what was often basically a rock'n'roll styling - although the latter was often to structurally define its framework, notwithstanding its obvious wayward tendencies), for Joseph the starting point was generally the chaos of the trip itself, the colliding, and simultaneous sounding, of musical elements from parallel universes almost. Audibly taking as much of his inspiration from elements in the music of Charles Ives, where brass and marching bands playing popular American anthems in different time signatures were set against each other (the chattering electronic collage at the very opening of this album closely mimics this aspect). Interestingly too, The United States Of America was a radical, guitar-less band, with the staple sounds conjured by a decidedly unearthly blend of violin/viola and ring-modulated manipulation of the sounds of those and other instruments like drumkit and bass (all of which made for rather queasy listening at times), above which glided the seemingly expressionless (rather flat-toned, but still eerie in impact) vocal lines of Dorothy Moskowitz, while sometimes Gordon or Joseph would take the lead. Arguably the most "conventional" tracks on the album were the swooning psychedelia of Garden Of Earthly Delights and the Airplane-like art-rock of Coming Down, while elsewhere the menu was bewilderingly diverse, with the overpowering hothouse ambience of Love Song For The Dead Ché and the startling, quite literal street-collision of Ives and Stockhausen-style musique-concrète (part 3 of The American Way Of Love) strangely complementing the melange of cacophonous cornball calliopery and smalltown-Smiley homespun American gothic of I Won't Leave My Wooden Wife For You, Sugar (this idiosyncratic track having been chosen to represent the band on the high-profile budget-price CBS Rock Machine sampler).

This complete and expanded edition of the basic album has loads of extra material: alternate or first takes of four of the album tracks, with two pre-album-session rarities and three tracks recorded just a few months after the album sessions but exhibiting a more orthodox band sound with guitar/s. The band split quite soon thereafter, so to have all the known recorded material collected together here is doubly valuable and not just a nice-to-have. At their finest, the United States Of America were something else, quite literally mind-blowing; in the words of the informative new liner note, "the cost of one admission is your mind".

David Kidman