Various: Brown Acid - The Eighteenth Trip LP

If one survived trips one through seventeen with one tiny speck of psychedelic sunshine intact, Brown Acid - The Eighteenth Trip will be the coming of age nightmare. Vintage underground ’70s hard rock, coming at one from bizarre angles, local scene wasteland America when everybody was out for themselves and the drugs went bleak. The guitars kill, the attitude is twisted, even the sex is headed down the wrong road. Real people, no compromise, pure and potent. Get stoked, take The Eighteenth Trip and know that the artists will get paid for this soul pulverizing! Here’s just some of the tracks included:

Back Jack out of St. Louis, Missouri in 1974 launch the trip with “Bridge Waters Dynamite.” It’s an invocation to rock flashing on Mark Farner whooping up a Grand Funk crowd, then getting to the point quickly with berserk guitar assaults. Heavy riff with power chord stalks beneath as one takes their advice… get loose and blow up the past.

Smokin’ Buku Band dropped Riding Easy’s jaw with the audacious track “Hot Love,” coming on like some fractured fever dream burlesque of Led Zep, moves out of Hollywood in 1980. Swooping elongated vocals above, a total Zep chord move at the end of each verse. Writer / producer Steve Shauger aka Shag Stevens gets a brilliantly messed up sound quality here, the ideal polar opposite of slick. The extended guitar break is an epitome of serendipitously crude virtuosity, simply outrageous!

Nothing better than an angry two chord guitar attack with cowbell to set the stage for this rant about getting “Ripped Off” by love. Taken from their rare 1977 LP on Dynamite Records, Chicago Triangle was Marvey Esparza, Dave Guereca, Jose “Tarr” Perez and Robert Aguilera. They unleash such strong brain-scrubbing wah wah frenzy in the guitar break here that it seems to perversely mock it’s own intensity! Brown Acid - the Eighteenth Trip comes at one from all kinds of uncanny angles.