I was going to do a little album-art-revealin’ and what-not with the Black Angels‘ Record Store Day reissue and became entranced by the Syd Barrett double-LP from R-to-the-S-diggety-D, An Introduction To Syd Barrett. It’s not only a super-heavy press on luscious black vinyl, it’s a treasure trove of sometimes-great, sometimes-cheesy visuals that fill two LP sleeves, a nice, slippery gatefold design and four LP labels themselves. It’s all upper-tier, though, as I mentioned, there are a few questionable images (who knows, maybe they have importance I’m not privvy to).
Props to the song selection; I own another Barrett LP or two and there’s a TON-TON of seriously too-strange moss growing on his discography. An Introduction avoids the rough schtuff and is fairly persuasive in its argument (I’m assuming here) for the acid casualty’s genius. In fact I just listened to it cover-to-cover and not a dud in the bunch. Again, impressive considering the land mines waiting in the field … though the five or six Pink Floyd songs are easy money.
To my ears the most interesting nugget is “If It’s In You,” a tune from Madcap Laughs that finds Barrett wriggling/wringing-out his voice for every last drop of creakiness in a creepy, hunchback-in-the-night manor. Like all good Barrett, it’s: Very English, very light on its toes, very-in-the-moment and as psychedelic as an acid-day is long. Oh yeah, you’ll be seein’ stars and comets and unicorns with sunglasses on and — well, I shouldn’t give it away, and besides, many of you have heard every single track on this record. So don’t look at this as a flashlight-shining-into-a-lost-cave revelation, more of a recap with servicable sequencing and an overall understanding of which of his pieces of material work best when attempting to tell Syd’s story.
