A collection like this one can't help but underscore what an amazing group the Mamas & the Papas were in their prime, and songs like "Monday, Monday," the immortal "California Dreamin'," "Go Where You Wanna Go," the autobiographical "Creeque Alley," and the gorgeous, haunting "Twelve Thirty (Young Girls Are Coming to the Canyon)" were simply great singles full of wonderful (and at times achingly spooky) vocals and harmonies and superb arrangements. The key tracks are here, with little filler, making this a fine compilation for those who just want the high points, although there's a good deal more to the story, of course.

Present Tense is the first Sagittarius album, released in 1968 by Columbia Records. Though the record was basically a Gary Usher solo project, he enlisted many top LA session musicians, and heavily utilized Curt Boettcher as a songwriter, musician, vocalist, and producer (even going so far as to include two tracks that Boettcher had produced on his own as the leader of the group The Ballroom). The album also contains the recording "My World Fell Down", which had no Boettcher involvement, albeit the LP version was edited, with the musique concrète bridge from the single version being excised (though a few extra bars of music were added in between the first and second verses). The single "Hotel Indiscreet" also had a similar fate when it reached the LP. The album was reissued on CD by Sundazed Music in 1997 with 9 bonus tracks. Two of these are the original single versions of "My World Fell Down" and "Hotel Indiscreet", as well as another track from The Ballroom, a Sandy Salisbury song, and the instrumental track for a song that was recorded by Chad & Jeremy. In 2006 the album was reissued again on CD in Japan by Sony in a Mini-LP style sleeve, featuring the album but with different bonus tracks, then again in 2009 by Rev-Ola Records but with the same track listing as the Sundazed reissue.

The 20th full-length album from of Montreal finds the band revisiting sounds from their early years, while still pushing artistic boundaries with their iconic style of pop & indie rock. Celebrated for their unique and prolific output, frontperson and primary songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Kevin Barnes recorded the album at Brooklyn's Honey Jar studios with audio engineer, Drew Vandenberg (Faye Webster, Toro y Moi), with basic tracking done live to a 16-track tape machine with Barnes' longtime live band. 'I wanted to capture a quick moment together and to make on-the-fly, spontaneous creative decisions', says Barnes. 'It felt very liberating and exhilarating to have to start and finish an album in a month's time'.

Test Flight is an absolute goldmine, spectacularly vibrant, and historically essential archival treasure by the legendary, criminally overlooked British psychedelic pop-rock outfit Airbus, meticulously compiled and released in 2010 by the revered vintage reissue imprint Wooden Hill Records. Spanning a massive 78 minutes across 25 masterfully written tracks, this high-fidelity document serves as the definitive anthology of a brilliant late-1960s and early-1970s Bristol band that famously shared management with the iconic progressive act Rare Bird. Bursting with soaring multi-part vocal harmonies, glistening 12-string acoustic strumming, and driving pop-rock arrangements, the band’s songwriting moves effortlessly between the sunny, melodic psych-pop brilliance of The Beatles or The Hollies and the pastoral, acoustic-tinged British folk-rock sensibilities of the era. The tracklist is packed with gems, highlighting the infectious hooks of Back On The Street Again, the swirling melodicism of Alias Oliver Dream, and the beautifully arranged, baroque-pop inflections of Susanna In The Summer and Windmill Hill. Exceptionally preserved in pristine dual-format lossless and high-bitrate audio, this expansive retro archive stands as a mandatory cornerstone and an absolute holy grail for global purists of late-60s British psychedelia, vintage pop-rock evolution, and lost UK rock history.

Recorded at EMI's Abbey Road Studios in 1967 during the final months of the original group's career, this British Psych-pop masterpiece yielded their last great hit 'Time Of The Season', but was destined for release after the Zombies had first broken up. It is the British pop group's all-time classic 'concept' album.

Pretty much every record released during the psychedelic era by EMI’s various satellite labels was honed and buffed to opaque perfection by the studio technocrats who were working for the company.

The Mamas & The Papas,Ultimate Anthology(TJL/Universal, 2016) :Ultimate Anthology has all of the groups recordings, each of the band’s albums, including a remix of 1971’s People Like U. Also includes a number of rarities, and 23 new-to-CD tracks (including remixed selections), and previously unreleased outtakes, with a total of 104 tracks. Ultimate Anthologyboasts ALL OF THE GROUP’S STUDIO RECORDINGS…that means every one of the band’s albums, including a revelatory new remix of 1971’sPeople Like Us,and a host of rarities, a whopping 23 new-to-CD tracks (including remixed selections), and previously unreleased outtakes!

A two-CD, 53-track set that includes for the first time ever the A and B side of every single the group released, all in their impossible-to-find-on-CD original U.S. mono single mixes. But this one-of-a-kind collection—which is remastered by Aaron Kannowski, the engineer responsible for our other acclaimed collections of singles by fellow Dunhill label acts The Grass Roots and Steppenwolf—doesn’t stop with The Mamas and the Papas’ singles. It also includes the solo single sides that group members Mama Cass Elliot, Denny Doherty and John Phillips cut for the Dunhill and ABC labels, again in their rare, original single mixes. Many of the solo singles and B-sides have never been on CD, let alone in their single mixes; plus, over the course of listening to this set (which clocks in at over 150 minutes), you’ll hear such legendary songs as “Monday, Monday,” “California Dreamin’,” “Creeque Alley,” “I Saw Her Again,” “Words of Love,” “Dream a Little Dream of Me,” “Glad to Be Unhappy,” “Dedicated to the One I Love,” and “It’s Getting Better” exactly as folks heard them over the radio back in those halcyon days.

While The Ark contained nothing quite as elaborate as "The Progress Suite" that had taken up one whole side of Of Cabbages and Kings, it was another psychedelic mishmash of styles - Indian one minute, musichall the next - of a kind so many popular performers had been indulging in at the time in hopes of making the next Sgt. Pepper. The difference was that most of Chad & Jeremy's peers had gotten it out of their systems the year before. But C&J were upper-class types who took naturally to the pretensions of the form - they thought they were making Art. Their listeners thought differently: The Ark missed the charts, and Chad & Jeremy broke up.

Nirvana's second album was dainty period British pop-psychedelia, falling on the lightest shade of that category that could be imagined. For some adventurous pop fans, few higher recommendations could be concocted. For most 1960s collectors, though, it's fair to say that it's too precious and insubstantial to qualify as a major work. Their most well-known song, "Rainbow Chaser," leads off, with its prominent phasing effects; "Tiny Goddess," one of their best ballads, comes next. The rest of the album doesn't measure up to those two tracks, with pretty but not compelling melodies (sometimes reminiscent of, but not in the same class as, Paul McCartney) and orchestration that, like the songs themselves, seem to tiptoe for fear of being too forceful. The overall result is too saccharine, and occasionally even childish.

This is the debut long-player from the southern California-based Strawberry Alarm Clock – the title track of this album topped national singles charts in December of 1967. As the cover art might suggest, their image practically defined both the musical as well as peripheral aspects of the pseudo-psychedelic counterculture. However, below that mostly visual veneer, Strawberry Alarm Clock actually have more in common with other "Summer of Love" bands such as Love and Kak than the bubblegum acts they have long been associated with. Prior to Strawberry Alarm Clock, the band was initially named Thee Sixpence and issued a 45 – "In the Building" b/w "Hey Joe" – in the spring of 1966. As legend has it, none of the actual bandmembers sang lead on the hit single; the singer was in fact a vocalist named Greg Munford, who was attending the session as a visitor.

Rhino Handmade expands the cult classic’s soundtrack into a three discs. Boxed Set with 21 unreleased tracks, outtakes, rarities, and live performances. Deluxe booklet features new liner notes by Andrew Sandoval and Rachel Lichtman highlighted by brand-new interviews with Michael Nesmith and director Bob Rafelson about Head, in addition to dozens of unpublished color photos.
This album contains songs and snippets of dialogue from the Monkees' full-length feature film of the same name. Although their Emmy-winning television program had been cancelled in the spring of 1968, the quartet quickly regrouped and, with the assistance of budding actor/director Jack Nicholson, created a 90-minute surreal cinematic experience - replete with matching soundtrack…

Limited Edition Box from Rhino Handmade. Includes stereo & mono mixes of the album on separate discs, each expanded with rare & unreleased tracks. The third disc collects more than two dozen unreleased tracks culled from the album's sprawling sessions complemented by a number of rare recordings.
The Birds, The Bees & The Monkees is the fifth studio album by The Monkees released in April 1968. Despite being the first Monkees album not to reach Billboard's number one, it charted instead at number three and eventually sold over a million copies. By the time they released The Birds, the Bees & the Monkees in April 1968, the Monkees had been on a nonstop roller-coaster ride for a solid 15 months. Record after record, live appearances and shooting their TV show made for an exceptionally busy schedule…

This 1968 album is one of the better examples of songwriter/producer/musician Michael Lloyd's overall influence and impact on the West Coast-based genre. Lloyd - who was certainly influenced by important albums like the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds, and various psych-pop sounds of the Brit-pop invasion, even harmony vocal groups like the Bee Gees - always seemed to find interesting ways to incorporate various sophisticated instrumentation (organ, horns, harpsichord, and string arrangements) into his productions. During this particular group's first recording sessions, Lloyd began transforming this We Five-ish folk-rock group into a formidable group (he also played the various instruments himself - because the group wasn't that proficient on their own)…

One of the most entertaining things to do on websites that allow customer reviews of CDs is read the apoplectic fury Kurt Cobain's fans have for the original Nirvana, the cultily-adored British psych-pop group from the late '60s. Much of that misguided and ill-informed venom seems to be directed toward this album, Nirvana's 1967 debut. An unashamedly twee early concept album, The Story of Simon Simopath (subtitled "A Science Fiction Pantomime," suitably expressing the deliberately childlike tone of the album) sounds, like most rock concept albums, like a collection of unconnected songs forced together by the story written in the liner notes. Ignoring the rather silly story (something about a boy who wishes he could fly), what's left is a regrettably brief but uniformly solid set of well-constructed psych-pop tunes with attractive melodies and rich, semi-orchestrated arrangements…