Brown Acid is a series of releases from ‘RidingEasy’ which features compilations of very hard-to-find rock tracks, the vast majority of which have remained unheard since their original release, in some cases more than fifty years back. The tunes featured in the Brown Acid series usually fall into one of three sub-genres: Hard rock, proto metal or heavy psych – music which was once referred to as the “bastard child of rock music”. As with all the other nine releases, the tenth series is rammed to the gills with some of the heaviest and most intense sounds released long before these terms had even entered the public consciousness. Brown Acid is doing for these genres what Lenny Kaye’s “Nuggets” series did for garage bands.
This tenth series opens with Bitter Creek’s ‘Plastic Thunder’, a glorious blast of Hendrix and The Who, and voted as one of the fiftieth heaviest rock tunes released before Black Sabbath. Conception’s ‘Babylon’ is a cover of Blue Cheer but they’ve added more distortion than the original. ‘Mr Sun’ from First Street Bank, is quite likely the best track Free never recorded with its Paul Rogers vocals and Kossoff sounding Guitar. Frozen Sun’s ‘Electric Soul’, with its heavy psych feel and Hendrix influenced guitar, asks us “have you ever been electrically stoned, you know, out there in the danger zone?”. This theme is continued with the Wright Brothers’ ‘Never Again’, the story of a trip and “searching for a new way of life”. ‘Head Collect’ by Tabernash has a delightful early west coast vibe and is a piece of psych rock evocative of the early work of Jefferson Airplane, and the album closes with what can only be described as a stoner rock classic, ‘All Together’ by Rubber Memory. Not far short of six minutes, it’s the longest track, containing few words but with plenty of stretched-out, acid drenched distorted guitar work.
The Brown Acid series aims at giving bands who released some exceptionally good music but who, whatever reason, ended up getting lost in the mix, the opportunity to be heard by a new generation of fans, because what’s quite astonishing is to realise most of these tracks have not been heard for around fifty years. This new release is a very worthy addition to those already released and here’s hoping the eleventh trip will offer even more long lost gems.
