Osmium begins the other side of the journey through the 1970s that would eventually see Parliament and Funkadelic unite. The latter made their self-titled debut (discussed here) in Feb. 1970 (Black Sabbath debuted the same month) and followed it that same July with the even-more-experimental Free Your Mind… And Your Ass Will Follow (discussed here). Parliament‘s first full-length, with 10 songs and a 45-minute runtime, came out the same month as the second Funkadelic, July 1970. It was the third George Clinton-led LP in five months.

Such a burst of creativity and such a definitive arrival — it wouldn’t be the last, what with the Mothership and all — makes for nice storytelling, but the two groups had separate beginnings, and Parliament was there first, Clinton having put an early version of the group together in New Jersey before taking the show on the road. In the early records, the lineups are listed as Funkadelic, which is the backing band, and The Parliaments, which are the singers, Clinton, Fuzzy Haskins, Ray Davis, Calvin Simon, Grady Thomas, etc. Guitarists Eddie Hazel and Tawl Ross, both on the Funkadelic records as well, appear here, as does Bernie Worrell‘s organ, Billy Bass Nelson‘s bass and Tiki Fulwood‘s drumming.

Familiar players in an adjusted context. Parliament have some things in common with Funkadelic. They’re fun. They’re weird. They tap blues and gospel influences. And so on. But they’re not the same groups and at least at the outset, they each worked toward their own ends. If Funkadelic is funky psych-rock on those early records, Parliament is more psych-soul inspired. The Temptations put out Psychedelic Shack in 1970 as well, Norman Whitfield was out there producing albums for Motown; it wasn’t unheard of to blend trippy sounds and soul music. Osmium — which is sometimes sold under the titles of Rhenium or First Thangs — complements the work Funkadelic were doing, and tells another side of the story of how Parliament-Funkadelic became a thing.

It’s not that the willingness to screw around with sounds and songwriting that made Free Your Mind… And Your Ass Will Follow so abidingly odd (also groovy) is absent here, but pieces like “Put Love in Your Life,” “Oh Lord Why Lord/Prayer” and the closer “The Silent Boatman” are more directly in conversation with soul and gospel music, and where Funkadelic‘s self-titled posited the blues as the roots of funk, Osmium tells a different story of the experience. In some ways it’s more cohesive — certainly the opener “I Call My Baby Pussycat” has a mission in mind to hook its audience — and in others it comes across as less clearheaded about its path forward. Parliament make it a party, rest assured, in “Little Old Country Boy” and “Moonshine Heather” and the later shredder “Livin’ the Life,” to say nothing of the showcase Worrell puts on alongside the oh-hell0-there operatic vocals by producer Ruth Copeland in “Oh Lord Why Lord/Prayer” — that song feels like its dwelling with a five-minute runtime and progression kinda-derived from Pachelbel’s Canon, but is memorable either way — or the boogie jam that takes hold in “Put Love in Your Life.”

But that party comes through as more structured, more purposeful in its shifts — maybe more commercial at the time? — and songs like “My Automobile” uses its off-the-cuff working-out-the-vocal harmony to give the impression of spontaneity without losing the feeling of intent behind the structure. As noted, they jam in “Put Love in Your Life,” and if the entire album was just the playfully naughty hook from “I Call My Baby Pussycat” on endless repeat for 45 minutes, living up to the suggestion for every single “Say it again!” along the way, I wouldn’t complain, but the real ripper is “There is Nothing Before Me But Thang.” Even that keeps its R&B edge in the trades between lead vocalists, but there’s no mistaking the push of the drums or driving jangle in the guitar. Repetitions of the title line become like the repetitive chug of a steam engine, and as they back it with “Funky Woman,” it’s arguably the hardest-hitting stretch of Osmium.

The caveat there, obviously, is that not all of Osmium is trying to hit hard. The swing of “Moonshine Heather” is one thing, but “Little Old Country Boy” does indeed toy with country music — “For nothing is good unless you play with it,” as per “What is Soul” from the self-titled Funkadelic — and though it feels somewhat like satire, “Oh Lord Why Lord/Prayer” and “The Silent Boatman” are both too long at more than five minutes and too dug-in to be entirely tongue-in-cheek, however much the handclaps in the finale argue otherwise. In any case, they don’t need to be in order to be subversive, and while it would be four years before Parliament put out another album and when they did, it would have something of a different persona, the swagger that defines the group’s later work is evident here, if in a somewhat nebulous form. On this first record, Parliament are by no means lacking for confidence in their approach — they were right about all of it and they knew it — but they were a less arrogant band sound-wise than Funkadelic out of the gate. You wouldn’t call either outfit humble.

Ultimately, Parliament would find its own way forward, and though Funkadelic started off stronger, the moment would change. The rise of disco in the mid-1970s and a fascination with dance music over rock-based styles, in part driven by records like Parliament‘s Mothership Connection (1975) and The Clones of Dr. Funkenstein (1976), would reshape the pop landscape, and Clinton was readier than many. He has the influence on hip-hop and the enduring legacy to show for it. Parliament‘s debut being less full-on heavy, psychedelic and rocking than Funkadelic‘s has given Osmium somewhat of a less iconographic status, but if you make it past “I Call My Baby Pussycat” without getting on board, it’s one of those situations where you probably want to call your doctor and tell them you died.

As always, I hope you enjoy.

—

It was a week. Yesterday was kind of a week on its own. First of all, I’ve started another Hungarian class. I now take lessons three times a week. Monday (30 min.), Wednesday (90 min.) and Thursday (30 min.). That’s a lot of magyarul tanulok but I’m doing my best.

Yesterday was also the release day for Switch 2, which my mother wanted to buy for The Pecan. Great, right? That’s a $500 investment in screen-time I don’t need to make and couldn’t really if I wanted to, so thanks Gram Pam.

The thing was, The Patient Mrs. and I also had THE meeting at The Pecan’s school yesterday to talk about next year. They want to put her in spec-ed part-time, which I don’t think we’re going to go for. A month ago they said it wasn’t the right call and the only thing that’s changed is the BCBA went on mat-leave. I don’t trust the school therapist and I don’t think she has the best interests of my kid at heart over her own operational convenience. That is, tuck my kid in a room so she doesn’t have to deal with her. I would call that less likely than how it’s probably going to go.

So the morning was 5:45 wakeup with The Pecan banging on the wall at the top of the stairs — I hate that; she does it every day; I remind myself it won’t always be what it is now — and breakfast and get ready and all that, then school dropoff, went and grabbed a cup of coffee, had the awful meeting until about 10:15, then picked up my mom and went to Costco, which reportedly had the Switch 2 in stock.

Great. We got there around 11 and immediately there was some drama about the Costco account and was my mom on my sister’s account and whatever the fuck god Costco is a nightmare with that shit. I had to go. At noon, I needed to be at the school giving The Pecan her meds for the afternoon. I needed to go home and mash up a pill in a banana. So I did. I left my mother and wife at Costco to handle the thing and went to the school to be there at noon.

The trick was that Hungarian was at 12:30. The school’s three minutes away, so that’s no problem, but Costco is about 10, so it was tighter. I left the school and hightailed it down Rt. 10 and met them at the door, they got in the car, we dropped my mom off at her house and The Patient Mrs. — who also had a 12:30 — and I both made our appointments. By 1PM, however, I was ready for the day to be over.

Fortunately, The Pecan had a new video game system to play with. Sup, Mario Kart. They should’ve called it Super Switch. Missed opportunity since that’s basically what it is. It’s the Super Nintendo of the Switch. It does the same basic thing, but with a new generation’s hardware.

The Patient Mrs. had a schoolboard meeting, so The Pecan and I were on our own. The bundle came with Mario Kart World — fun to drive around, looks great, runs well, not enough to be a flagship launch title on first blush, but Nintendo has always blundered launches somehow — and a subscription to Nintendo Switch Online, which has a bunch of older systems’ games. Much Zelda, but no Twilight Princess. The Wind Waker is on there, but having finished the second quest on my laptop, I’m not dying to jump back into the Great Sea. I’ve got A Link to the Past going on my phone in no-rush fashion — I did the first Dark World dungeon the other night, beat Helmasaur King, etc., and then apparently was too stoned to save the game, so I need to start that over — and I’m looking forward to Donkey Kong Whathaveyou coming out next month. Bananza, it’s called. Because bananas.

Anyhow, we played Mario Kart for a while and upgraded Tears of the Kingdom — the family save, not mine from the other Switch; I’ve had that game going for a year now — to the Switch 2 edition, which runs well, looks good. I’ll still keep my other game on the regular Switch (1) for now, but might transfer to the OLED if The Patient Mrs. puts her Breath of the Wild on the Switch 2, which would at least mean more battery life and the nicer screen.

But compared to yesterday, today is bound to be mellower and that’s good, though The Patient Mrs. just came in and asked if I wanted to go buy masonry glue for the steps outside and a handle for the bathroom window, so maybe my next hour and a half of sitting on ass has been redirected. So it goes. Often.

I wish you a great and safe weekend. Have fun, watch your head, stay cool and all that. I’m back Monday with a Goya review that should’ve gone up two days ago and much more.

FRM.

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When in Rome, you do as the Romans. When in Cali, you get your ass to Amoeba Music. An Amoeba haul is a special thing. It had been five years — half a decade! — since the last time I set foot in Amoeba‘s San Francisco store, right on Haight Street, more or less the birthplace of American counterculture, or at very least where it moved to from the Midwest because it was okay to be weird there. It is a shop we must remember we are fortunate to still have in existence. Places like Sound Garden in Baltimore, Vintage Vinyl in my beloved Garden State, and the three Amoebas in San Fran, Berkeley and L.A. are treasures. Landmarks. Their preservation may not be government-sanctioned, but they’re no less essential as living monuments of our age.

I’d gotten in after two in the morning. My flight from Boston to SFO was delayed… by five and a half hours. Something about a flat tire on the plane that then wound up requiring an entirely different aircraft altogether. Oh, we sat, and sat. Supposed to be a 5PM flight, took off just after 10:30. What a shitter, but at least it took off at all. I slept about 20 minutes on the plane — remember, with the time zone shift, a 2AM West Coast arrival is still 5AM to my very red East Coast eyes — and then crashed at the hotel, woke up this morning and spent the bulk of they day shaking hands at the convention that brought me out here, trading business cards and the like. All the while, lurking at the back of my mind was Amoeba Music, its call resonating like a dogwhistle nobody else around me could hear. I could’ve cried when I got out of the cab and it was there, just like I remembered.

Seems likely there was more vinyl around than five years ago, though I wouldn’t commit to that 100 percent, not really remembering one way or the other, but in any case, I still found plenty in the CD racks; the notion of traveling with LPs, the general expenditure and desire to actually listen to the music keeping me to the more compressed format, and no regrets. Here’s what I grabbed, alphabetically:

Acid King, Middle of Nowhere, Center of Everywhere
Black Rainbows, Carmina Diabolo
Electric Wizard, Time to Die
Horsehunter, Caged in Flesh
Monolord, Vaenir
Parliament, Motor Booty Affair
Stoneburner, Caged in Flesh
SubRosa, More Constant than the Gods
Swans, To be Kind
Tekhton, Alluvial
Wino & Conny Ochs, Latitudes
Wovenhand, Refractory Obdurate

Of those, it turns out the Black Rainbows was a double. I suspected as much, but I spotted it at the front of the clearance section and it was a dollar, so I figured even if I had it, another wouldn’t hurt. Getting stuff like the Acid King and Monolord was nigh on mandatory, the former because it’s San Francisco and that album is incredible and the latter because it’s a RidingEasy Records release and while I’m pretty sure that label is headquartered south of here, you don’t find that stuff every day on the Eastern Seaboard.

Conversely, I was looking for a bunch of stuff from Tee Pee — Mirror Queen, The Atomic Bitchwax, Death Alley — that was seemingly nowhere to be found, and I wondered if geographic distance between myself and the NY-based label didn’t have something to do with it. The rule is you take what you can get, and I was happy to do that. The Horsehunter was also absurdly cheap, I’m not really sure why. Between that and the Black Rainbows, it was much easier to justify paying upwards of $14 for new discs and $20 for the Labour of Love Latitudes session from Wino & Conny Ochs. I was on the phone griping to The Patient Mrs. as I walked around the store that somehow even though compact discs are “out of fashion” prices haven’t come down on them and she reminded me to think of it as a premium for being in a place so awesome. She was, of course, 100 percent right. Issue resolved.

Parliament‘s Motor Booty Affair to feed my continued funk addiction, and Stoneburner mostly because it was there, it’s Neurot and I don’t already have it. The Swans is the three-disc special edition of last year’s To be Kind (review here) that also comes with a live DVD as a bonus. Can’t imagine I’ll ever watch the thing, but it’s nice to have. Speaking of stuff I won’t actually put on, I know for a fact I haven’t listened to the Electric Wizard since I reviewed it (the promo was digital), but I heard something about them having a spat with Spinefarm over money or some such and that the album was subsequently out of print, so I figured better now than five years from now on eBay or Amazon. It will likely stay wrapped, but at least it’ll be in the library.

It’s been six years and I still recall enjoying Tekhton‘s first album, Summon the Core (review here), so to find a copy of the 2009 follow-up to that 2007 debut was cool enough to drive me toward the purchase, and Wovenhand are Wovenhand, which is all the justification that one needs. Speaking of bands who played Roadburn this year, as Wovenhand did, I nabbed 2013’s More Constant than the Gods by SubRosa mostly because I missed them at that festival and they’ve continued to haunt me ever since. I’m not sure if playing the record or having paid for it — like a church bribe — will exorcise that demon, but it seemed worth a shot. I’m sure I’ll let you know how it goes.

Tomorrow is more work stuff, starting bright and early and ending less-bright and late. I may or may not make it to Aquarius Records, as had been my hope, but if this turns out to be all the shopping I get to do on this trip, I can’t really complain. And of course, if you’re in SF, get your ass to Amoeba Music.

SubRosa, More Constant than the Gods (2013)

Amoeba Music

Amoeba San Francisco on Thee Facebooks

It’s an album not of your world, but fear it not. I guess sometimes you just get into a groove on something, but I must’ve listened to the Funkadelic self-titled debut like six different times over the course of this week. Oh, my office was jammin’. Maybe not. Still fun though, and as much as anything’s ever been a classic, this is. Rocking this and the new Clutch record (review here) back-to-back, you really get to hear the Dan Maines blueprint in some of these songs. I also had Humble Pie‘s Smokin’ on in the car before. There’s some of that in there too.

Anyway, I couldn’t think of a better way to end a long, spaced-out week than this 1970 wonder, also long, also spaced-out. It’s a ham hock in your corn flakes. What part of the evening I didn’t spend wolfing down a calzone, I’ve spent watching Star Trek and feeling worn out. Two shows I missed tonight. Usually, I’ll miss one. Tonight, two. Mighty High played with White Dynomite, and Samothrace played with Bezoar and Pilgrim, both shows in a Brooklyn too far. A long, discouraging day at work that began with a $1,700 mechanic bill, and I’m broke, beat and ready to give it another go tomorrow. That Samothrace tour rolls into Philly for Saturday night. Think I might do the same if I can. Gotta put that new front suspension to work on something, might as well be I-95.

Yo.

Thanks to everyone who checked in this week. I haven’t looked at the February numbers yet, but it seemed like things got a pretty good response in terms of people spreading around links if not necessarily comments on everything. So it goes. I guess I’m too wordy most of the time, by the time someone finishes (if they finish), they probably feel like too much has been said already. I can dig it. Sometimes I don’t have much to say either.

If I do wind up at that Samothrace show in Philly, look out for a review of that. Eggnogg‘s also got a gig somewhereabouts next Wednesday that I might try to hit up because I like those guys. Live reviews are a shit-ton of work — though I just bought a fancypants new lens for my camera last week and that adds to the fun — and when something lands as flat as did that Enslaved/Pallbearer review did, can be kind of a bummer. That one would’ve made a thud had anyone been paying enough attention to hear it. So it goes. They can’t all be gold, or Acid King, which the band was kind enough to share on Thee Facebooks. Acid King has been stuck in my head all week too. Not a complaint.

This week, I’ll also be reviewing The Ultra Electric Mega Galactic‘s new record and posting that Endless Boogie interview I alluded to last week or whenever that was. If you’re not familiar, that review is here and that record is awesome. I kinda got annoyed at the hierarchy of industry cool involved in chasing down track streams with labels and PR, so I’ve all but cut that out, but maybe I’ll try and get something going anyway, just for kicks. Not that we’re exactly lacking music around here anyway. Media blitz and shit.

Wherever you are and whatever you end up doing over the next couple days, I hope you have a great and safe weekend. See you on the forum if that’s your thing, which I hope it is. The Patient Mrs. and I are waiting to hear back on an offer we put in on a house in Massachusetts, so maybe one of these days I’ll have some good news to post that doesn’t involve somebody’s next record or European tour. If you’ll pardon me now though, I’m gonna uncross my fingers before I go to sleep. Okay.

There’s always something special about a basement record store, so I was only too glad to descend the flight of stairs leading to Boston’s Armageddon Shop during my recent trip there to see Black Pyramid, Gozu and Infernal Overdrive at Radio in Somerville. I’d been to the Providence location before, and found it much to my liking, so the Boston one seemed an obvious choice to pass some time before the show.

From what I understand, it’s relatively new, and it looks it. The walls, but for a large cork bulletin board overflowing with flyers, were painted bright white — very neo-black metal — and the floor was clean and unscuffed, kind of emphasizing a minimalist look. It wasn’t cramped, as a lot of record stores are, and the entire right side of the store and most of the left as well was devoted to well-spaced bins of vinyl. A shelf directly across from the entrance had some tapes on it, so I went there first.

It doesn’t appear in the picture above, but that’s only because I’ve been so unwilling to remove it from my car since I made the purchase. For $3.99, I got a cassette of C.O.C.‘s Wiseblood, and of all the money I spent that night, that was hands-down some of the best. CDs took up a whole section of the back wall (there were some dollar boxes as well that I glanced through) with the discs positioned sideways so you had to crane your head even as you bent down to look at the bottom rows.

Turned out to be worth the effort. I bought The Body‘s Anthology, because hey, it’s New England, and Paracletus, by Deathspell Omega, because I figured I’d want it eventually and I might as well spend the money there rather than give it to Amazon or whoever. There was a cheapy copy of last year’s Aphotic by Novembers Doom, and I’ll probably never listen to it, but I got that anyway, just to have it, and a used version of The Late Great Planet Earth by Mos Generator that I figured (rightly) would do my rockin’ soul some good.

The finds of the trip, though, were an original CD issue of Parliament‘s Funkentelechy vs. the Placebo Syndrome — which fucking rules — and the first Witch Mountain record, Come the Mountain. I’m sure I could find all kinds of reissues of Funkentelechy if I wanted to, but it was cool to hear a first-run pressing (cooler still because it too was $3.99) and Cordell Mosson‘s bass and Bernie Worrell‘s keys make the whole thing. And the Witch Mountain I just figured I’d missed the boat on and would never find, what with it being released over a decade ago, the label Rage of Achilles being defunct and the band being on the other side of the country.

I guess you never know what you’ll find, which is probably the reason I keep going to these places even as they seemingly all start to phase out CDs in favor of vinyl. General compulsion you could consider as a secondary factor, but either way, I was glad I had the chance to hit up this Armageddon Shop, because like the other one in Providence, it was a cause definitely worth supporting. Check out their website here.