1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 75. Love – Da Capo (1966)

 

Love are another Californian band, with their fingers in the psychedelia pie, but they go beyond that with a mix of different genres, with a bit of beat pop, a bit of jazz, a bit of Latin, a bit of rock. Side two of the album is entirely taken up with a long tour de force of instrumental free-form jazz (Revelation), which apparently the band hated but I loved. It may have been there as a snub to the label Elektra, by deliberately not writing any more songs, and it was apparently cut down from an hour of the original jam to a mere 18 minutes and 57 seconds. 

Probably the most well-known is the short and explosive 7 And 7 Is, a piece of proto-punk, but the rest are all growers. Stephanie Who Knows has demented timing, veering between 3/4, 4/4, and 5/4 (I had in my notes “a bit like Take Five”), jazzy sax and almost flamenco guitar, vocalist Arthur Lee falling somewhere between Jim Morrison and Mick Jagger. Orange Skies is a more wafty, floaty tune with a backing flute, and sounds a bit like Silly Games by Janet Kay (you know the one, the super-high vocal reggae). Very Californian. And then ¡Que Vida! takes that tune and gives it a bossa nova kind of beat. The Castle is more folky with some nice acoustic guitar arpeggio and again lots of tempo changes. She Comes In Colours is oddly Nineties, although I can’t think off the top of my head who it reminds me of. It’ll come to me. Had to laugh at the lyric “When I was in England Town”.  

I only made very sketchy notes on this and so, unusually, went back and listened again, and it’s a bit of a grower is this album. 

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