WEST COAST POP ART EXPERIMENTAL BAND - Part 1 (Reprise SRI 6247) Italy 1967 LP
Vinyl: VG+ (strong) | cover: VG+ (aged, front is laminated, B-side is flip-over, sticker-rest on back cover) | sticker on label

The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band's first album for Reprise was the best of the group's career, in large part because it was the most song-oriented. It was still plenty weird, almost to the point of stylistic schizophrenia, but when you got down to it, much of the record was comprised of fairly catchy songs in the neighborhood of two and three minutes. At times they sounded like reasonably normal, fairly talented Byrds-like folk-rockers ("Transparent Day," P.F. Sloan's "Here's Where You Belong"); at others, a Kinks-like garage band ("If You Want This Love"); and at others, a fey Baroque pop outfit (the orchestrated "Will You Walk With Me"). There was an undercurrent of unsettling weirdness and even paranoia, though, in some cuts with otherwise pleasing tunes, like "Shifting Sands," with its sizzling distorted guitars; "I Won't Hurt You," with its heartbeat bass and disconnected vocals; and "Leiyla," where a standard teen garage rocker suddenly gets invaded by spoken dialog that seems to have been lifted from a vampire B-movie. The cover of Frank Zappa's "Help, I'm a Rock" flung them into freakier pastures, emulated convincingly on the group original "1906," an apt soundtrack to a bummer acid trip with its constant spoken refrain, "I don't feel well."