VA - Up All Night - 20 Heavy Nuggets from the Golden Age of Hard Psych (2009)

In the late '60s and early '70s, many bands were making, or caught in, the transition between psychedelia and hard rock. This comp has 20 cuts from that mini-genre's heyday, most of them from quite obscure bands and releases, though a few actually made a modest commercial impact. Certainly SRC (represented by the "Up All Night" title track) are fairly well remembered and fairly well regarded, as to different extents are a few other acts here, like Damnation of Adam Blessing, the Litter, and Sir Lord Baltimore. Most of these fellas (and they certainly are all fellas, likely strutting their pretty macho-oriented stuff to a largely male audience as well) won't be familiar to many collectors, however, though some had connections to famous figures like Rick Derringer, Frijid Pink, Johnny Winter, Eddie Kramer, Shadow Morton, Mountain, and Frank Zappa. It's well annotated and for the most part rare, if ultimately rather more pedestrian than the packaging. The songs are often on the grim side and motored by riffs more aggressive than catchy. They're sometimes very derivative, too, Granicus' "You're in America" taking the cake as one of the most blatant Led Zeppelin imitations, and Yesterday's Children's "Providence Bummer" being a thin rewrite of the Yardbirds' "The Nazz Are Blue" (which itself was a thin rewrite of "Dust My Blues"). One longs for more deviations from the usual approaches, which come along occasionally in cuts like Euclid's super-heavy cover of the Spencer Davis Group's "Gimme Some Lovin'"; the West Coast psychedelia-influenced vocal harmonies of Dragonfly's "Enjoy Yourself"; and the contrast of maniacal laughter, playful nursery rhyme psychedelia, and doom-soaked horror-movie vocals in Haystacks Balboa's "The Children of Heaven."