Dynastie Crisis "Vivre libre" b/w "Faust 72" France 1972

It was my intention to post a compilation this past weekend, but I was hit with a computer virus that took me most of the weekend to clean out of my machine.  I have a backlog of LPs to post, mostly compilations, but editing and labeling those audio files takes a lot of time, so for now here's a single and I hope to post an LP this coming weekend.

It would be nice to claim that this was a cool find on a trip or at a flea market, but it was simply an eBay purchase that I was the sole bidder on.

With a bunch of hair farmers and one baldhead, these guys look a bit like Spirit, and honestly given the variety of sounds that classic band gave us these guys can be said to sound something like them in places as well.  For some reason many French, Italian and other Romance language speakers seemed to have trouble producing rock'n'roll rhythms smoothly in the '60s, and although some gems were produced from those countries, early on many of the records from southern Europe up through the garage era sound awkward to me in a sense I have trouble describing.  Something about the rhythm section is often just a little bit off, as if the musicians had rock'n'roll verbally described to them once without ever hearing it in person.  (I sometimes think this is somehow related to language as Germanic and Slavic and some other speakers don't seem to have had these problems for the most part, but on the other hand neither did Latin Americans, so who knows...)  Many of my favorite '60s French recordings are things like Serge Gainsbourg productions that aren't really even trying to replicate straight rock'n'roll.  Once we get to the '70s and harder rock and prog, the different groove that France was in actually seems to have worked for them and produced some cool sounds.

The A-side here has some interesting percussion in a good way, almost Latin, and the addition of some flute puts this in the mid-ground between any hard rock early '70s band, Santana and Jethro Tull.  The B-side is even better, a blend of hard rock and prog with interesting keyboard sounds.

The band was only together for a few years, releasing only two studio albums.  More info here.

Live free or die.

Petra Janů & Pro-Rock "Exploduj!" LP - Czechoslovakia 1979

This LP was purchased yesterday at a record show in the Fishtown section of Philadelphia, and has leapfrogged several other records I had in mind to be today's post ... because you need to hear this now!  It's rare when an album meets up to the expectations of cover art and photos this far out there.  Back cover photo posted below.

This is a pretty wild, often punk-intensity, hard-rocking psych-prog release with the odd orchestral and/or synth passage.  I could see it appealing to fans of several genres.  It was a release on the state Supraphon label, which seems to still be in operation in some form.  Lyrics are in Czech; there appears to be a futuristic/space thing going on here but this isn't a language I understand.  Since the '60s and up through the Velvet Revolution, Prague has had a reputation for harboring an avant garde arts scene which has crossed over into popular music and included socially relevant bands such as Plastic People of the Universe.  That makes the presence of this sort of release less surprising coming from that corner of the world.

Ms. Janů, who might have been born Jana Petrů if I'm reading this Czech social networking site's info correctly (it looks like you might be able to contact her directly!) has been active in the Czech music scene since the mid-'70s.  She has a discography here - this appears to be the second album and I'd love to hear the first.  She's been performing the title track from the first album as recently as last year - and in the US!

Note that I'm categorizing records based in the country that existed at the time of their release.  Note also that my track listings are missing some of the diacritical marks over certain letters required by the Czech language.  I figure you either knew what was meant if you can read it or you wouldn't understand it anyway, so I'd save myself a bit of effort.

There's a whole lot going on with this album and in some ways I feel in hearing this as I did upon hearing Os Mutantes (which this does not sound like) for the first time... a bit pleasantly disoriented, amazed that this exists, that it could be this good and this unknown here mostly because of language, cultural (i.e. the refusal of most English speakers to listen to music in other languages), political and probably economic barriers.  Similarly I think the variety of influences is going to make this interesting listening for years to come.

Czech it out.