Much as I love Stand Up and Led Zeppelin's II, Sea Shanties definitely occupies the title of heaviest album in 1969. Guitarist Tony Hill had apparently been paying close attention to Hendrix, as the distorted, scorching tones he employs on the record are certainly borrowed off of Jimi's experimental noisemaking Are You Experienced?. Think Black Sabbath playing style crossed with the dirtiest of Hendrix's guitar tones, but that's only one element. Simon House's driving electric violin throws in a certain degree of 'artsiness', even "proggishness", as the man battles with Tony's guitars, and Tony's vocals are so close to Jim Morrison's that some of the 'softer' parts on the album could easily be mistaken for lost Doors' outtakes.

A smashing, mastodontic, grunge-and-everything-else-predicting riff almost rips out of your left speaker, and as you scream running for cover into the shelter of the right speaker, another even heavier and poisonous riff rips out of it, too, throwing you back to the wall where your family will be gathered to scrape you off with a toothbrush. Then, however, the second riff goes away, replaced by House's twiddling violin, and as Tony starts to sing in his devastating Morrison influenced tone about the perils and dangers of life, you can easily understand why this album didn't make much of an impact in 1969. For that period, it was so unbelievably hardcore and radical that promoting such a thing might have caused one serious problems. It only gets heavier and heavier and heavier as it progresses, until you get the feeling that the room is burning up in flames and start getting visions of Mr. Hill with scorched, charred fingers and thick black smoke coming out of the amplifiers.

Classically-influenced, medievalistic compositions with well-constructed, but not instantly memorable vocal melodies that all eventually transform into this dirty, stinkin', rotten, exciting sludge. The sound, at times, is so apocalyptic and thunderstormy that it fits right in with the album cover. But I bet you anything you don't hear that kind of "sea shanties" at sea. Not often, at least.

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