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Jennifer Gentle, "Ectoplasmic Garden Party"
Italian music listeners seem to have an enduring interest in rare psychedelic, progressive and kosmische music from the late 60's and 70's. There is a clutch of Italian labels like Akarma, Comet and Horizon that tirelessly pump out deluxe reissues of obscure chestnuts from America and Europe's recent rock past. Not surprisingly, a number of new groups have come out of Italy in the last few years that owe a tremendous debt to this tradition of psychedelic esoterica.
Lexicon Devil
Jennifer Gentle are a four-piece, fronted by a head named Marco Fasolo, who writes all of the music and lyrics. Jennifer Gentle's sound shows an obvious fascination with bands like The Residents, Captain Beefheart, as well as lesser-known progressive acts like the Third Ear Band and The Edgar Broughton Band. I like to imagine that Fasolo owns the entire back catalog of Harvest Records. Predictably, the music is very derivative of these musical fetishes, but that doesn't necessarily make it completely worthless. Jennifer Gentle have personalized their influences and arrived at a somewhat unique freaked-out combination of cartoon noises, toy percussion, Neanderthal guitar solos and inarticulately screamed lead vocals. Ectoplasmic Garden Party is a two-disc set collecting Jennifer Gentle's first two full-length albums - released separately as I Am You Are and Funny Creatures Lane. The first disc is weak. A series of questionable stylistic exercises, I Am You Are is the sound of a band trying to find their footing, and failing to coalesce. On the opening track "Sound-Check", the band launches into a loping, primitive rhythm section with stupid guitar licks and distorted helium vocals, sounding like The Chipmunks covering a Shaggs song. While it's funny at first, it soon becomes obvious that The Residents did this nearly 30 years ago with more interesting results on albums like Third Reich and Roll. The only salvageable song on the first disc is "Bring Them", a dark, trance-inducing riff reminiscent of The Velvet Underground's "Sister Ray". The riff keeps cycling around as Jennifer Gentle add layers of fuzzy, hypnotic melodies, guitar feedback and drone. After this track, though, the band makes a sudden, inexplicable left turn into Incredible String Band territory, trying their hand at a couple of psychedelic folk ballads with male-female "call and response" vocals. This is a bad idea, as the lyrics are mostly inaudible, and the whole thing stinks of a bunch of unbathed longhairs, sitting by the campfire on acid, trying to channel Pentangle with an out-of-tune guitar. The second disc, Funny Creatures Lane shows exponential improvement over the first album. The band has learned to play their instruments a little better, and the production is more polished. Jennifer Gentle have also narrowed their musical focus, and are able to deliver a set of twelve twisted psych-pop songs that are redolent of something out of a dimly remembered past. Their new emphasis on the "pop" in psych-pop brings with it an increased interest in singsong-y vocals and bright, catchy melodies, not unlike The Electric Prunes' first two albums of paisley garage-pop. These songs are enhanced by Jennifer Gentle's odd instrumentation, purposely low-fi production and insistence on perversely mutated cartoon-character vocals. They have also chosen better musical ideas to imitate this time, with interludes that randomly and deliriously quote (or steal) from classic krautrock, garage rock and progressive. They also frequently reference Ennio Morricone and Goblin, with their dense, experimental soundtracks to the horror, spaghetti western and trash films that have played a significant role in Italy's artistic heritage. While none of the songs on Funny Creatures Lane stand out from the rest, the album is a consistently engaging trip through the weird record collections of four crazed Italian hippies. 
