YOU USED TO THINK is one of those rarities of pure inspiration that rates up there with first platters by the MC5, Stooges, Fugs, Velvet Underground, Silver Apples, Godz, Pearls Before Swine, etc... a classic ‘68 underground album: a collage of fucked-up eastern ragas, jazz, and atonal folk rock, delivered in a beautiful, raspy, feverish, drug-induced howl, featuring the poetry and singular voice of Erica Pomerance. ESP produced more than its share of outsider visions and here was an album more like a situation, that peeked inside and outside the bullcrap of the music world and the various genres it endlessly pumps out.Get it here.
Thanks to the Palestinian Light Orchestra blog
3 comments:
This is indeed a great record and one for which I cannot understand the criticism made by All Music.
I had compared You Used to Think's jazzy tones with that of Linda Perhacs' slightly more famous Parallelograms. However, whereas Parallelograms at its most experimental is ambient in the vein of Krautrock without the keyboards and at its most political satire of hippies, You Used to Think really is radical and its politics and decidedly forthright in its music. The striking thing is that Pomerance on a song like "The French Revolution", can blend lyrics that are strikingly sexually explicit with such beautiful music.
More than that, on "Koanisphere" saxophones really sound like violins because they are played so hard, and the jam with guitars and percussion is so dense it feels like the song goes for twenty minutes instead of seven!
Thanks for this great review.
Erica Pomerance
Thanks for the comment!
On Best Ever Albums I have a provisional list of the greatest albums of all time here. I am going through the list and revising the later entries and giving thoughts on each album. I recently did You Used to Think and it can be seen on the fifth page.
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