Friday, May 31, 2013

SRC / Milestones (Capitol/EMI, 1969)


I wrote a sweet post for this record while sitting at a bar last weekend and it seems to have disappeared. Now I'm not sure I have the energy to reconstruct it. Bear with me.

The short of it is: I found SRC when I was futzing around on music blogs about 4-5 years ago. Someone had posted "Black Sheep," the first track on their self-titled debut record, and I couldn't help but notice the screaming guitar tone, super hot. I listened to the whole record of psych-prog fuzz a few times, liked it a lot, and promptly forgot about the band for the next half-decade, as tends to happen when you have unlimited access to all the music ever made in the world.


All that by way of saying it took me a minute to remember why their name sounded familiar when this record appeared on the wall at Academy. Milestones is their follow up, and I think I actually like it better than that first record. Side 2 is especially well-written and well sequenced, and if the spoken intro to "The Angel's Song" dates this record in a way that will never not be embarassing, it hardly takes away from the fuzz-fest that follows. Take a look, though, at the lyrics printed on the verso in the photo below and tell me if it doesn't sound like something you might have had to sing at your middle school graduation.


Record blogs and CD reissues can probably convince you that there were a million bands like SRC out there between 1967 and 1972, probably at least a thousand in Detroit area alone, from where these guys hail. But this is a better than solid example of the genre, and I love the guitar sound courtesy of Gary Quackenbush; it's still my favorite thing about the band. It's very, very trebly, to the point where I have to turn down the treble knob on my receiver to avoid feeling like it's blasting the enamel off my teeth. But I do have the feeling I'll come back to this record every few years.





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