Kaleidoscope

The Mexican Kaleidoscope's sole, self-titled album is like many American '67-'68 psych-garage obscurities in its morose, frequently minor-keyed blend of ominous organ and fuzz guitars. Yet mucho eccentricity and spontaneity make it more interesting than many such relics. That organ really vibrates with a menace, sometimes like a distant cousin to the Doors, but with a more adolescent, untutored sensibility. Although the vocals (all in English) are often lovelorn laments, they drip with snarling attitude veering from don't-give-a-damn bluesiness to abject self-pity, mixing in a psychedelic sense of disorientation that sets the songs aside from the more conventional romantic lyrics of earlier mid-'60s garage bands. And some goofy psychedelic touches appear without warning, like the cheap outer space signals in "Colours"; the Harpo Marx-like horn interjections in the same tune; the atomic explosion that ends "Hang Out"; the out-of-nowhere distant, cornered-wolf yells of "A New Man"; the weird, slightly off-key plunks of "I Think It's All Right," which ring like a tapped wine glass; and the funk rock guitar of "I'm Crazy," which sounds halfway between a chicken-scratch and a drawer being opened and closed, giving way to a harem organ. Then there's the eight-minute "Once Upon a Time There Was a World," which sounds like an unwitting parody of suicidal teenage angst in its over-the-top sorrow for itself, yet backed with a creepy organ-fuzz arrangement of almost funereal grandeur. ~ Richie Unterberger