VA - Forge Your Own Chains: Heavy Psychedelic Ballads And Dirges 1968-1974 (2009)

Forge Your Own Chains represents the best and worst of that impulse. To the credit of curator Egon, his liner notes state that the purpose of this collection isn't to show off a bunch of rare collector-baiting nuggets but to find common threads between an international assemblage of acid-rock oddities. And the subtitle-- Heavy Psychedelic Ballads and Dirges-- points to an intriguing vein of music; more intriguing yet is the aim of collecting variations of it from five different continents. But when you're working with psychedelic rock, one of the most uneven genres when it comes to old, small-press, and private-press releases, even the best intentions can result in a bit of a mess.

The good news with Forge Your Own Chains is that listening to it all the way through will leave you with both positive first and last impressions. Bookending the comp with its two most sprawling and intense tracks is a canny move, and what Top Drawer's mournful, wailing-guitar-in-a-cathedral epic "Song of a Sinner" and the open-throttle squall of Baby Grandmothers' "Somebody's Calling My Name" share is a sense of slowly-building anxiety, which they use to different ends. But a sizeable chunk of the stuff between these two tracks lacks a lot of their focused intensity, and there's moments where a conceptually promising piece of music is let down by an amateurism that can't quite match the ambition.