Maybe the best psychedelic rock album you have never heard
Lawrance M. Bernabo | The Zenith City, Duluth, Minnesota | 06/06/2005
(5 out of 5 stars)
"Your best bet is to pick up the CD that has both of the albums from the psychedelic rock group H.P. Lovecraft, but if you were only going to get one then their 1967 debut album would be the one. The group's second album has its moment, but it is not as focused as the first effort, which contains a nice blend of original compositions and covers of songs by the likes of Randy Newman ("I've Been Wrong Before") and Fred Neil ("That's the Bag I'm In" and "Country Boy and Bleeker Street"). The best song on this collection is "White Ship," written by band members George Edwards, Dave Michaels, and Tony Cavallari. One of the defining elements of the group was that Edwards and Michaels often sang dual vocals and while there are a couple of tracks you would do well to just program out of the mix when you play the album, this is certainly an above average album for the psychedelic rock genre (I certainly like H.P. Lovecraft a lot more than Vanilla Fudge).
The songs, according to the liner notes, were inspired by horror writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft's "macabre tales and poems of Earth populated by another race." However, notice that the first album ends with a brief bit of the "Gloria Patria," as a sort of "We were only kidding" from the band for worshipping musically at the altar of the Old Ones (and perhaps even Cthulhu himself). Actually, the only song explicitly dealing with one of Lovecraft's stories on these two albums is "At the Mountains of Madness," from the second album. That happens to be my favorite Lovecraft story (it is more of a novella) and the song that got me to listen to this group's albums in the early Seventies in the first place. Fortunately I listened to this first album otherwise I probably would not have remembered the group (I was going to give an example of a group from this period that I had forgotten, but, of course, I cannot). I did find out that there was another group named Lovecraft that put out some albums in the late 1970s, but that group is not this group. So this is the one album that you want to check out from that decade for any group named Lovecraft or any variation thereof."
Track Listings (10) - Disc #1