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Review: 'LIQUID GENERATION'
'Quarter To Zen'   

-  Label: 'Green Monkey Records'
-  Genre: 'Eighties' -  Release Date: '18th March 2016'-  Catalogue No: 'GM1034'

Our Rating:
Quarter To Zen presents Liquid Generation's long lost recordings from 1982. Recorded in Seattle during the band's youthful prime before they disappeared in a haze of liquid acid and other such things. Yes it's the band's one legendary impossible to find single and 15 bonus tracks!! Yum!!

It opens with Quarter To Zen, all about having a quarter of a tab too much and being higher than they need to be. It comes drenched in reverb-y guitars and the great drumming signals lift off for some real cool garage psyche rock.

The first time I heard the album, the moment LG's version of We're Pretty Quick came on...well, not only was I singing along but asking whose version of this classic I already own. I'm still searching for the answer to that question, but the original was by The Chob and this version of it is pretty good but not quite drowning in enough reverb. It just needs more reverb and more echo to be perfect but it's damn cool even as it is.

All Good Things is a good, fast and loose psych rocker with a cool chorus and some great yelps and hollers along the way. Hang Up is like The Seeds (or more accurately, as it's a cover) like The Wailers on more acid and weed than normal as the singer is real pissed at someone hanging the phone up on him.

She's Mine is like a 60's girl group song twisted around and thrown into a garage for a while with doo wop-py backing vocals and lyrics that could be a little on the sexist side. But these were different times and damn, there's some real wild guitar screaming at ya.

From Home is a bit slower and more basic as a plea to get the girl to go home. Well, yeah, will she go? Will this music get her to go home or not? If she's sensible she'll tell him she's staying to the end of the record at least. Out Of Our Tree is about, well, you know, getting out of our tree or sitting in a tree getting all beatific and as all Nuggets fans know is another cover of a song by The Wailers.

This Is World We Live In sounds like Daniel Johnston playing over a big bad Bo Diddley beat. Once Before slows things down as they plead for some more loving (or more drugs). I Need You sounds like one of those sappy 70's soft rock songs but being played by a garage rock band thinking of going surfing, so that's alright.

Little Girl was apparently the band's signature cover song and this version is pretty mighty and close enough to the Syndicate Of Sound's original but with some great off kilter guitar madness adding to the sound. Til the End Of Time smothers the song in crackling, buzzing amps and guitars and screaming vocals to take this to a place where it sounds like it should be a cover but isn't.

Nothing is a fuzz laden and (at times) quite gentle song telling someone they need nothing from them as the little riff repeats and the fuzz drives over the top of everything. Going Out Of My Mind is (I guess) from the KSU Seattle radio show that introduces it and then it sounds like loads of the bands I spent the mid to late 80's catching live in London, such as the Fuzztones and The Cannibals: that sort of 60's proto garage madness re-worked for the 80's. A very cool tune, basically.

I Love You is about as sweet as this lot get and that isn't too sweet at all with the amount of fuzz going over a very normal sappy love song so that it ends up sounding anything but. It builds and builds ready for them to shoot it all over the object of their desires.

The album closes with Endless Summer which starts off as the least interesting thing on the album and for me is the one tune I'd have probably left off the album. It shows them trying to be more sensitive than a fully-fledged psyche-Garage rock band like Liquid Generation should be but as the last tune you can always press stop early.

But no worries. This album is well worth finding for lovers of obscure Garage Psych rock. You can find out more at: Green Monkey Records online
  author: simonovitch

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LIQUID GENERATION - Quarter To Zen