Aquarius Blue - Blue Aquarius (Remastered) (2020) [Hi-Res]

Rare funky gospel album released on Stax offshoot label, The Gospel Truth. Includes the moody 'Foxfire'.

As an aside from both the traditional and more cutting-edge gospel styles in the Gospel Truth catalog, 1973’s “Blue Aquarius” is a stark departure in sound and subject matter. While the album may be classified under the “religious music” banner, the album foregoes any notion of “gospel,” aiming instead for followers of a new age spiritual sect known as the Divine Light Movement.

Founded in northern India in 1960 by Hans Rām Singh Rawat, the organization was led in 1973 by his 15-year-old son, Prem Pal Singh Rawat, known to a purported base of more than one million global devotees as Guru Maharaj Ji. Much like Stax had done with its Los Angeles Coliseum concert in August 1972, the DLM staged a large-scale festival in the Astrodome in Houston, Texas. Centered on growing its U.S. membership, the three-day event featured speeches by the Guru, a performance by Enterprise Records avant-garde bluesman Eric Mercury and 50-piece band Blue Aquarius, who’d already pressed this LP of odes to their leader.

The group was led onstage and in the studio by Maharaj Ji’s older brother Shri Bhole Ji and former Bee Gees drummer Geoff Bridgford. Met with derision by American reviewers in its day, the album has held up, in some regard, as a relic of the so-called “Age of Aquarius,” in which musicians in the U.S. and U.K. upheld a movement of music inspired by Eastern philosophy and aimed at soundtracking the freedom of youth counterculture.

“God Is Love,” the album’s cinematic opener, utilizes a moving and emotive wall of sound to usher in the sheer magnitude of the enormous orchestra. There, winding, rushing brass carries the listener as far away from their own reality as the DLM’s teachings suggest. Still, the album is at its best in its meditative moments, such as the quiet and subdued “Rock Me Maharaj Ji,” a song that does all it can to appeal to potential followers with a trance-like soft rock exterior, encapsulating its very direct religious intentions.

Digitally remastered