Madrigal (7) – Madrigal

Certainly an interesting find for anyone who regularly spends time spelunking into the acid archives of underground rock history. The music is totally unpolished, but that's actually the draw here. Similar to Seventh Sons, this one just simply defies the known chronology of music. They sound more modern than any of the bands who were actually trying to sound modern in that time period, and from the looks of it, they really had no idea how advanced they really were. Call it a fluke, call it dumb luck; but the truth is that the vein these two nobody's struck in the studio would eventually get tapped into by a whole generation of musicians a few decades later. And because basically no one ever got a chance to hear it—let alone be influenced by it—we just have to accept that this sound got developed completely independently from them. Which is a fascinating thing, from an anthropological perspective. Like a missing link that was never actually there.

The noisy experiment titled "Stoned Freakout" is pretty random and not overly thoughtful or exciting, but the mellow indie-folk of Side Two is actually quite charming. It sounds like an early K Records in the mid-90s (check out "Places" or "Fallen Tree" to see what I'm talking about). At any rate, this has to be one of the first invasions of a drum machine on a rock record, and the result is endearingly heartfelt, and surprisingly uncold.