psychedelic

An obscure San Francisco-area group that cut one extremely rare album in 1968, Armageddon (recorded at Leo Kulka's Golden State Recorders, and issued on MTA), which is highly valued in some collector circles. Actually, they don't rank as a very impressive find, in fact epitomizing some of the period's least enduring excesses. They originally recorded under the name Stonehenge, with a female vocalist, before assuming their more familiar name, and left behind a good deal more than an album's worth of tracks, some of which turned up on the 1995 Sundazed CD reissue of Armageddon.

There are at least three bands who perform under the name Blonde On Blonde: a) Blonde on Blonde was a guitar-led psychedelic rock group from South Wales. The band was originally formed in Newport in 1967 by vocalist/guitarist Ralph Denyer, drummer Les Hicks, bassist/organist Richard Hopkins and guitarist/sitar player Gareth Johnson. Even though they enjoyed strong reviews from music critics and achieved massive exposure playing before gigantic crowds at the 1969 Isle of Wight festival, they never managed to generate much in the way of sales. They disbanded in early 1972.

As the voice of the celebrated psychedelic trio Dead Meadow since 1998, Jason Simon has helped craft many captivating, hook-laden songs while the band has enjoyed a successful, highly regarded decade-plus career. Simon's "wispy tenor" and "mystical lyricism" have been called "mesmerizing" by Rolling Stone while his distorted axe riffs and wah-wah pedal effects have been said to "ooze early '70s psych-rock power and experimentalism" by Spin.

Fabulous Diamonds are Melbourne duo, Nisa Venerosa and Jarrod Zlatic. Nisa plays drums and sings, Jarrod plays sax, electric organ, keys, and synthesizer through time-lag accumulators to make their unique avant-garde music humbly disguised as pop minimalism. Truly experimental, defiant of glib categorization, advanced and yet totally stoned-sounding.