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Rant: I used to skip The Red Krayola's 'The Parable of Arable Land' like everyone else
I always heard people say their 1967 debut was just noisy nonsense from the Texas psychedelic scene. But I found an old blog post from a record collector in Austin that broke down how the band recorded side two in one take with about 20 random musicians, and that crazy energy actually makes the whole album work for me now. Has anyone else given this one a real chance past the first track?
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dakota_rivera5mo ago
That whole side two being a one take thing, does that change how you hear the tape edits? I read somewhere the engineer was just punching in random sections live while they played, so those cuts aren't planned edits, they're basically accidents that became part of the performance. Makes me wonder how much of that album is just happy mistakes they decided to keep.
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tarab545mo ago
and that's exactly why it clicked for me too, honestly. I think people hear that first track "Freeform" and just write off the whole thing as random noise, but the backstory of side two being this total free-for-all jam session with a bunch of different people playing whatever they felt like... that makes the chaos feel intentional, you know, like they were trying to capture a real moment in time. Once I stopped expecting it to sound like a normal album and just let it wash over me, I started hearing how the weird tape edits and the almost gospel-like vocals actually build this strange, hypnotic thing that sort of makes sense in its own way. It's not something you can listen to on a loop or in the background, but when you're in the right headspace it feels more alive than half the polished stuff from that era. I've gone back to it a few times now and I think the key is to treat it like a one-off art piece rather than trying to fit it into what you typically expect from psych rock from 67.
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