The Atrocious Music Collection: #28 in a series
Artists: Various
Album Title: Incredibly Strange Music – Volume I
Category: CompilationYear: 1994
Cover art style: "This compilation is scientific"
Audio samples: see below
Acquisition: Uncertain. I seem to recall this was purchased while traveling, so might have been a store I only went to the once.
Click on any picture for full-sized image
There’s been Incorrect Music, Outsider Music, Atrocious Music, and now Incredibly Strange Music. Suffice to say, not all I.S.M. is A.M. Not that it really matters, as the two Incredibly Strange Music CDs are objectively a lot of fun. Today, we examine Vol. I.
A companion project alongside Re/Search’s #14: Incredible Strange Music book, this CD “surveys the territory of neglected garage sale records (mostly from the ’50s-’70s), spotlighting genres, artists and one-of-a-kind gems that will delight and surprise.” There’s talk of “recordings by (singing) cops and (polka playing) priests, undertakers, religious ventriloquists, astronauts, opera-singing parrots, beatnik and hippie records, and gospel by blind teenage girls with bouffant hairdos,” but that’s overselling the CD. I really wish that was all in here. The book includes much more than is what on the CD, and seems to be interview-based, featuring discussions with the artists on writing and/or recording these songs. Excerpts from the book can be found online here.
The CD booklet is larger than most, so I’ll leave most of the comments to the experts at Re/Search and say very little. You can read the booklet pages if you click for the larger picture files. I will start with my four top tracks and then follow with the rest of the album.
Will to Fail
A cheerful tune about the Freudian concept of the Will to Fail from an album full of "Songs of Couch and Consultation." The words and music are on opposite sides of the see-saw, so the speak, balanced just so for maximum comedic effect. Jazz saxophonist Bud Freeman wrote a dozen songs' worth of lyrics for the album, which Leon Pober set to music and Bob Thompson arranged, with folk singer Katie Lee singing. Other tracks include Repressed Hostility Blues, Guilty Rag, and Hush Little Sibling. A follow-up to the 1957 album was made in 1960 (Life Is Just a Bed of Neuroses).
Up, Up & Away
Pajpet & the Sepoy, on their album Flower Power Sitar, present an instrumental version of the 1967 5th Dimension easy pop hit about flying in a hot air balloon, with the lead melody on a sitar that appears not to have been tuned to the equaled tempered Western scale (which is what everyone else seems to be using on the track).
William Tell Overture
Wow. Fred Lowrey is amazing. I mean, really. I know it’s only whistling, but…just…wow!
A Cosmic Telephone Call
This may be the highlight of the album, but at over 10 minutes, you really just want Kali Bahlu to get on with it. Or is that exactly why this is so perfect?
The rest of the disc:
Buddy Merrill - Busy Bee
What is it with Flight of the Bumblebee? The Atrocious Music Collection has at least three versions, including a disco one, and there's a ton of other odd takes out there, including one by the Trans-Siberian Orchestra. Poor Nikolai.
Bob Peck – Sweet 16
Teenage delinquencies reminded they can’t go to jail if they are only “sweet 16.” An attempt at humor, but lacking the humor part.
Dean Elliot – Lonesome Road
Some odd stuff being used to make the sounds in a big-band chart. Let's call it a poor man’s Spike Jones.
Harry Breuer – Minute Merengue
Chopin’s minute waltz jazzed up and on xylophone. See Busy Bee comment above - another abused classical tune.
The Scramblers – Mister Hot Rod
The highlight of the song, if you can call it that, is Mister Hot Rod speaking to us directly. He appears to be an idiot loser.
Dave Harris – Dinner Music for a Pack of Hungry Cannibals
Not much outside of the outrageous title. And album cover...
Perrey & Kingsley – Swan’s Splashdown
It’s right there on the 1966 album cover: “Electronic Pop Music of the Future.” As it is now the future, this should be what we are all listening to. Elsewhere in the collection is their extra-strange rendition of Strangers in the Night
Billy Mure – Hawaiian War Chant
More guitar (see Busy Bee, above). I think everyone wanted to be Les Paul in the early '60s.
Jo Ann Castle – Tico Tico
Accordion. ‘Nuff said.
