Friday 16 September 2016

What Love [Suite] (The Collectors, 1968)

Those who love proto-prog bands and tracks will be glad to find here one of the earliest suites featuring a distinctive progressive flavour: "What Love" by Canadian band The Collectors. Coming from the North-American psych scene, these Vancouver-based musicians filled the entire B-side of their debut album with a diversified and colourful 19 minutes suite, featuring ethnic instruments, arcane vocal harmonies, classical influences, folk atmospheres, R & B echoes and pastoral themes.

The Collectors only released two albums, both in the late '60s.

The spiritual side of the Seventies surely inspires some of the moods in this song, but its best virtue is, IMHO, the stong and coherent plot in which so many different ideas are cleverly framed. I rarely listened to such a rich and solid architecture in a '60s long track. In this sense, I rarely listened to a proggest song from that era, no matter what the story and the genre label of The Collectors were. Good, good music this is!

No comments:

Post a Comment