Under all the exotica and period sounds, The Bevis Frond has stayed with a heavy 60s-style psychedelic sound and at its core, meat-and-potatoes rock. One can dig the quirks and humor without hearing addled lyrics about how far away the singer's hand looks at the end of his arm. Nick Saloman employs eloquent, left-field imagery to address concrete, sometimes mundane subjects-- getting old, going to court, dealing with the old man who owns the guitar shop-- and his swagger-free voice and genuine English accent lend the wordplay conviction. Every song has a great hook or riff, and Saloman's guitar sears across these lo-fi recordings. The solos jam icicles in your eyeballs. The riffs slam your solar plexus. The few long jams stick to fundamentals and eschew free-form noodling. He sounds like he could go on forever, yet he manages to stop before you feel like checking your watch.

To hear the mystic vision and drive of one man, Bevis Frond mainstay Nick Saloman, give flight to the weird and wonderful visions inside his head. Saloman attempted to recast the lysergic flights of both the UFO scene and Haight-Ashbury into 1980s England, where punks and longhairs and weirdos of all types could just vibe out to the beautiful music. That's The Bevis Frond experience. Just like the fucking Lord of the Rings trilogy, the musical progression of The Bevis Frond albums are an enthralling and magical odyssey. You're not condescended to or preached at, you're invited along as a fellow traveler on a pretty bizarre odyssey. It's a fried journey, baby! Long hair and heart-melting choruses. I was talking to a friend about The Bevis Frond just last night, and he said it was like geeky psychedelia. I thought that was great, but then I wanted to one-up him so I said, "yeah kinda, but also like Dinosaur Jr. learning Syd Barrett's back catalog."

Regardless, The Bevis Frond experience is a diehard freak scene. Yow. Diamond sharp pop is tossed around like dusty Palantirs. And that's not all. Four-tracking across a bejeweled universe with fire-breathing distortion guitars, baby. It's just fucking fascinating, as a virtue of this reissue series, to hear an artist develop so quickly, all by himself, using the bare minimum tools of "rock" and recording. To the point where you're like, damn, this guy is one of the ONES! And next thing you know, you've given yourself a Jimi Hendrix perm and have been wearing a homemade Bevis Frond shirt (puff paint and chain mail) for two weeks straight with no respite. You'd be fucked if this music wasn't the key to the universe.