1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 94. The Beau Brummels – Triangle (1967)

A San Francisco band named after an 18th century English dandy, this is their fourth studio album and by this time they were reduced to a trio, hence the name of the album I guess.

The music is a country rock/beat pop/psychedelia crossover that has a lot of variety to the style of the songs. Some tracks, such as Triangle or the Randy Newman cover Old Kentucky Home are in much more of a country style, while It Won’t Get Better is much more laid-back and bluesy. Are You Happy Now is a bit of lively folk/pop while Only Dreaming Now slows things down and brings in a bit of gypsy accordion.

More psychedelic elements (inevitably for 1967) occur in the longer tracks (most of the tracks on here are of the two-and-a-bit minutes of the classic pop sing), with The Painter of Women being a bit baroque with harpsichord, and its parade of archetypal characters is both very Dylanesque and also prefigures elements of prog. The Keeper of Time manages somehow to sound like a mix of a lushly orchestrated Scott Walker song, and a country hoe-down, at the same time. Perhaps my favourite tracks are the folk-psychedelia of Magic Hollow and The Wolf of Velvet Fortune, wandering off into fantasy lands with gorgeous instrumentation.

Leader singer Ron Elliott has a Dylanesque quality with added vibrato, and he manages to carry off the variety of songs. I think the Beau Brummels ended up heading down the country-rock strand of their disparate styles, which is understandable given that over the next few years this is the emerging form and psychedelia is fading away. This is another album where I wonder exactly why it is included. Is it another example of the psychedelic era? Or maybe drawing attention to an overlooked band? Maybe let me know, or I could actually get the book I’m supposed to be following.

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