Bring Hammonds Back!

One of the better covers of a classic Donovan track, Wynder K Frog's hammond-laced pop is a perfect match for the psychedelic original. Listen out especially for the end, where Mick Weaver goes into full-on freakout mode on the organ. We need more hammonds in modern pop; if the banjo can make a small-scale comeback then surely the hammond deserves re-evaluation too, being (subjectively, of course) a far superior instrument.

See Emily Play

Glad I remembered this video, a few years after I first saw it on the BBC’s Seven Ages of Rock series. A brilliant rendering of the English psychedelic aesthetic, the video is the song in visual form, a blend of the bucolic and the bizarre. This is Pink Floyd at their best; like many others I prefer the experimental pop of their early work to the comparatively measured sensibility they later exhibited. "See Emily Play" and their albums up until roughly Ummagumma have much more character than the stilted social commentary of their prog rock output.

When 60s Pop Collides With a Vague Sense of Horror

Any time I've read about the classic Seeds song "Pushin' Too Hard" it's always been in reference to the supposed ineptitude and rawness of the track, and its nature as an example of all that's good and bad about 60s punk. While this is undoubtedly important, I always wondered why no one picked up on its sinister mood - it's always carried an eerie mood for me, from the backing vocals to the creepy electric piano solo, placing it alongside Doors tracks like "End of the Night" or "Not to Touch the Earth" in my dark psychedelic top 10. Thank God for allmusic.com then, because reading Richie Unterberger's review proved that others have garnered a similar feeling.

Choice analysis includes: "the two chords that are alternated between throughout the song, for one thing, are pretty odd: dark and minor, yet nigglingly creepy. The combination of thundering stiff hyper-fast drums, fuzzy guitar, and electric piano creates a foggy...stormy atmosphere" and "crucial to the musical appeal of this recipe are the ethereal, nerve-jangling high harmonies at the end of each verse, as the other Seeds mournfully drone "too hard." So there you have it, a small critical consensus! The appeal of much of the Nuggets continuem isn't in the bands' apparent ineptitude itself, but in the very strangeness spawned from their attempts at emulating more professional pop music.

The Great Forward-Thinking Sound of the Silver Apples!

The Silver Apples are one of the most interesting bands in pop music history. Propelled by the constant, propulsive drum rhythm that would later become known as "motorik" when used by Neu! and textured with early synths, the result is a clash between control and chaotic noise. The synths ambush the ears and create a trippy atmosphere, the antithesis of the steady rhythm section. Well worth a listen if you want to hear the strange beginning of not just krautrock, but the foundations of electronic music as a whole.

Song of the Day: The Inspiral Carpets - She Comes In The Fall

The Inspiral Carpets remain one of the most underrated acts of later psychedelic music. While their output could be patchy, the number of stand out tracks make up for any filler padding out their albums. Matching psychedelia with contemporary alternative rock, they were classed alongside leading lights the Happy Mondays and The Stone Roses with the "Madchester" scene, which later expanded geographically into "baggy." The most important aspect of that style was (as mentioned before) the merging of older psychedelia with later styles like indie or house music. The Inspiral Carpets took the psychedelic influence the furthest, at the most extreme sounding like a slightly late addition to the Nuggets canon.

A true gem in their back catalogue, "She Comes In The Fall" throws prominent organ lines into a frenetic, rolling mix. Exhilerating and an excellent introduction to the band.

Song of the Day: The Doors - Blue Sunday

Morrison Hotel, the album that followed the stylistic experiments of Waiting for the Sun and The Soft Parade, is often viewed as The Doors going "back to basics," drawing more on blues and basic hard rock as opposed to the strings, brass and softer lyrical themes of those two albums. As with most tenets of rock mythology, this is a simplistic, reductionist way of looking at the band's evolution. In reality, the lines between these three albums are illusionary, blurred by exceptions here and there that betray the strict divisions favoured by some. Songs like "Not to Touch the Earth," "My Wild Love," "Five to One" and "The Soft Parade" contain stylistic experimentation and often disturbing lyrics and atmosphere, defying the consensus that they are overtly commercial works. Similarly defiant, "Blue Sunday" from Morrison Hotel showcases a soft, restrained rhythm section bathed in resplendant organ lines. Thematically, Morrison penned a love song, complimenting the music perfectly and collectively creating one of the finest songs in The Doors' back catalogue. Not only does "Blue Sunday" demonstrate the dual nature that defined the majority of their career, it also destroys the notion that the love song and "softness" represents a sell out or a regression into despised showbiz pop.