Rainy Day Mind

Like many of their peers, British record label Ember entered the psychedelic slipstream toward the end of the '60s, just as the sound ceased to be the sound of the underground with many of its signatures seeping into the mainstream. Ember hitched a ride to these trend-hopping productions, adapting the fuzz and wah-wah guitars along with trippy hippie harmonies, channeling these affectations to testifying country-rock, sunshine pop, lite soul, and bubblegum-anything that might have hit the charts, hopefully following Ember's licensed Glen Campbell singles into the charts. Some succeeded modestly and some disappeared completely, thereby becoming collector's items, and the best of the batch appears on Fantastic Voyage's 2009 compilation Rainy Day Mind: Ember Pop 1969-1975. Despite a few big names (P.J. Proby and Denny Doherty being the headliners) and a few cool collector-bait cuts (Davey Payne & the Medium Wave's opening "A Walk in the Sunshine," Mother Trucker's stomping glam rockers), this is chiefly appealing as a pure time capsule and sometimes -- as on a cover of "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" that makes the Beatles' original seem like heavy metal and a toothless spin on the Who's "Call Me Lightning" -- even that is a bit of a stretch, but as Ember got into bubblegum, glam, and ambitious singer/songwriters, the music gets quite a bit better, with the concluding stretch of sides by Proby, Doherty, Black Swan, and Mother Trucker being quite fine indeed. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine|