There are psychedelic relics, and then there is this album, from a Chicago outfit which used to count Peter Cetera as a member – but before they were called “Aorta”, of course.This is a very weird and derivative bird, to say the least. The template here was The Beatles and Sgt. Pepper, but this time around they center the concept around – yes – life itself! Well, sort of. There is this running theme of the “The Main Vein”, a.k.a., your heart. And so, they cut four tracks which are littered throughout the record which are in different moods and tempos and such, trying to answer that age-old question we all have – “have you ever wondered what it is?” The rest of the album is not as incredulous but it is head-scratching at times, in that “time warp back to 1969” sense. The production is super-compressed, to the point where it practically runs from a solitary bass line to the whole band-meets-full orchestra in like 10 seconds kind of compression (“Sprinkle Road to Cork Street”). All of this is extremely dated, yet, taken as a whole, there is something here that is engaging and dare I say, moderately fascinating, in a late-night B-movie kind of manner. In fact, this is the garish, rough-hewn, cheap and somewhat grotesque version of Sgt. Pepper, without an ounce of that project’s originality, but overloaded with ambition a-plenty, and not above swiping ideas from others. For example, “Ode to Missy Mxyzosptlk”, one of the singles, sounds like their demented, small-minded take on “Incense and Peppermints”. Apparently, the album art has become something of a collector’s item, and was re-issued on CD sometime in the mid-90’s. Overall, it bears repeating – it’s your main vein!
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