Psychedelic Folk Radio Talks about Brian Gladstone

Yes – There is actually is a Psychedelic Folk Songs Radio Program … (We were surprised too!) by Gerald Van Waes, Belgium. Brian Gladstone : Psychedelic Pholk Psongs                

Now this is a difficult one. First of all the cd starts with a humoristic insane naïve stupid long hair hippie cowboy song. The finger picking is, as well as on the second track very  fast and well crafted, reminding the banjo. With "Flashing before my eyes" I think : "if Clive Palmer was a cowboy it might have sounded like this".

Ragtime like humour can be find on "I like me", with fast blues chords, fingerpicking and some  kazoo. Most of the tracks first to be followed are beautiful psychedelic folk songs (male/female duo, acoustic guitar, some flute,..) and they sound exactly like we, collectors of psychedelic folk would like to hear. It was confusing to hear these differences at first hearing but after repeated listens I had much less difficulties with these contradictory inspirations. Brian plays the guitar very well and he has good ideas. On the few solo guitar tracks his style seems to be a combination of folk fingerpicking / blues and ragtime.    

The second half of the cd combines often the style of the psychedelic folk with a more lively stoned way of singing country folk songs as lullabies for stoned hippies or nursery rhymes for the mentally insane. Luckily most of this is still drenched with spacecakehumour.

I once heard another so called psychedelic ssw so called collector item influenced by country : Peter Grudzien with "Unicorn". That one contains incredibly bad ssw and singing, so bad that it becomes almost unique and very enjoyable, but then for me still within the category of humour. Country is often used as genre to express by so many mediocre artists. 

Brian Gladstone however who definably has some country influences at a few more  tracks succeeds to be enjoyable even there.  That means that the second cowboy song "Cowboy of the West" and the blues song (I mostly hate blues too) I am able to accept after a few hearings within this concept. Only the long track "The highway man" is somewhat boring. Some of it need a bit more time to get into, another part is easily appreciated.

Two of the tracks to be played : "Save the Wolverine" (click for sound sample), "Do you think that you're Dorothy" (click for sound)