#0101: I Had Too Much To Dream Last Night - The Electric Prunes

Have you ever sat on a washing machine in its spin cycle when you're constipated?  That's the image conjured by the band name.  The album title suggests that a clever play on drink/dream is enough to make a winning trippy title.  I predict the contents of a loosened bowel at 1800rpm.

Ready?

The title track opens the album and it's a snare on the down beat driver with the guitars all put thru a tremolo turned up to 11.  To my obvious surprise it's got a decent melody and tho the B section is trying a bit too hard to be unpredictable, it's a decent opening number.

Bangles, however relies on the same beat and the same effects and in spite of the melody and chords finding their own identity, the overall feel is too close to the first track.  The change has a different time signature and the progressions are interesting so it's a bit of a disappointing track ordering fail, really.

The next track, Onie, is a slow, major-seventh-littered piece; soft and gentle and how it avoids the cloying tack of muzak is an achievement in itself.  Nice change of pace in spite of yet again drowning the whole thing in that tremolo effect.

Are You Loving Me More finally releases us from the tremolo and gives us a decent 60s rock number with rotor organs and moves on to another upbeat tune in Train For Tomorrow.  I'll say this for the songs, they're odd progressions making use of quite peculiar intervals and my inner ear is finding it a challenge to nail them down.  Makes for interesting listening and his soft, breathy vocal is very pleasant.

This fifth track gives way to a jazz waltz solo section where the guitar isn't exactly Kenny Burrell and perhaps a bit too ambitious for the tone set but it's keeping my attention even if the general feel is that the guitarist may be playing beyond their skill level in trying to extemporise the entire solo instead of preparing something they could've played more confidently.

Sold To The Highest Bidder has a mandolin-driven Mexicana polka feel and is quite painful.  It feels like it's supposed to be a parody or a send up of the style.  "Going going gone" pronounced with max melodrama is pretty funny but that mandolin (if that's what it is) is giving me a real arse ache.

Next up is a messy 12 bar with way too much reverb called Get Me To The World On Time.  Nevertheless it bobs along quite inoffensively until the side tom makes an entrance and the rhythm switches to a Fade Away analogue that puts everybody of a certain age in mind of the Scotch 3M VHS advert from the 80s where a stop-motion skeleton Rex Harrisons his way thru

"I'm gonna tell you how it's going to be 
With Scotch's lifetime guarantee
Tape what you want both night and day
Then rerecord not fade away,
rerecord not fade away."

Resurrecting the Heart and Soul rhythm A Quarter To Nine is a cheekily pleasant jazz stroller that could've stood to be a bit longer rather than giving us The King Is In His Counting House, a working example of a weaponised harpsichord taking the main accompaniment for what isn't so much chamber music as chamber pot music.

My missus agrees.  Or least I think she does based on her having just walked past and remarked "what the fuck is this shit?"

Try Me On For Size is a nice little upbeat number incorporating a glockenspiel to good effect without lampooning themselves and then we've got a proper oompah-honky-tonk-pub-piano finale in The Toonerville Trolley.  The rhyming options are pretty slim pickings but the lyricist has spared no expense in shoehorning every single one of them into these words. 

So where does that leave us?  Rather than the total shit show I expected, they've actually managed to achieve a precarious equipoise between groovy tunes and unequivocal cock.  3 stars.