Arguably Britrock’s most prolific one-man cottage industry, Nick Saloman has amassed a back catalogue of around 30 self-produced albums over the last three decades, all painted in 50 shades of vintage psych-pop and guitar-heavy stoner-rock.
One of three releases dating from 1987, the second Bevis Frond album contains a typically uneven spread of inspired gems, solid retro homages and workmanlike jams. Saloman’s sprawling banquet of sound includes bubbles and birdsong, submerged chants and TV samples, musical jokes and lysergic lyrical screeds: ‘sister of the exiled duke, who bathes in tepid asses’ puke’. It’s pungent stuff in places. A Nightmare on Carnaby Street.
Saloman’s quaint Englishness is a key selling point, invoking Syd Barrett on trippy inner-space journeys like Window Eye or the dainty organ ballad Defoliation Part Two, then dropping a wry vocal clip of Harry Corbett from The Sooty Show into the shape-shifting psych-rock supernova Once More.
But the more ear-grabbing tracks here shake off their self-consciously historical trimmings and really blaze, like the free-jazz wig-out Termination Station Grey or the J Mascis-style guitar-shredder Mediaeval Sienese Acid Blues.
Of the six patchy bonus tracks, only spangled garage-psych pastiche Run At The Sun and deft, fast-paced instrumental Solid Vimto really merit rediscovery./o:p
