1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 116. The Incredible String Band – The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter (1968)

 

Another album where the cover and title deceived me. I was expecting maybe a return to country music, but this is more avant-garde, early prog stuff (labelled on Wikipedia as acid folk). The Minotaur’s Song answers the never-asked question of what it would be like if Gilbert and Sullivan dropped acid (“I’m the original discriminating buffalo-man/ I do what’s bad whenever I can”). Other tracks are even stranger, wandering musings on life and spirituality, amoebas and water, played on a collection of odd assorted instruments among which are sitar, harpsichord, pan pipes and dulcimer.

Lead singer and musician Robin Williamson (not to be confused with Robin Williams, but sharing a similar penchant for free-form maundering) has a bit of a droning, nasal voice which I found kind of wearing after a while; I think the songs might be better if sung by somebody else. It reminded me naggingly of somebody else, with Scottish chanted/spoken vocals over a harmonium, like a hippy Methodist service. I think perhaps it was comedian/musician Ivor Cutler that I was thinking of.

Strangely eclectic and wonderfully bizarre, especially the suite of music called A Very Cellular Song. I don’t think it’s something I’ll rush back to, but it’s also an album that I will remember for a long time. I was pondering this, and which of the 115 previous albums I have much recollection of, and it tends to be the oddball and novel that stand out. I couldn’t, for example, name any song from the Everly Brothers album, but I can remember most from, say Nina Simone or Charles Mingus. Pleasant and tuneful is good (I think this would be terrible torture if *all* of the albums were like Mingus or Zappa), you need the unusual as well.

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