
RED KRAYOLA - FAMILIAR UGLY -Parable Of The Arable Land- 16 page booklet- 2xCD
CHARLY"The Ground-Breaking 1966 album. Re-mastered by SONIC BOOM. 2CD edition with both the Stereo & the first re-issue of the Mono version. 16 Page Booklet with previously unseen images. Deluxe Media Book - Limited Edition."
On their 1967 debut album, the Red Crayola themselves conjure up a sound that's part psychedelia, part garage punk, and partly some sort of experimental rock that would not truly make itself known until many years down the road, and they generate an impressively freaked-out energy on deliberately primitive numbers like ‘War Sucks’ and 'Hurricane Fighter Plane.’ Six of the twelve tracks on The Parable of Arable Land are devoted to the Red Crayola; the rest find the three members of the group collaborating with friends, acquaintances, and fellow travelers credited as "the Familiar Ugly.” Pitchfork gave it a 9.3 and said: “In March 1967, The Red Crayola walked into the studio and spent a day making one of the most visionary album of the year, The Parable of Arable Land. It's a band that has no idea how to play its instruments. In fact, they don't even know what instruments are, or if the guitarist has the ability to remain conscious long enough to play whatever it is a "note" might be. Shattered psalms, wobbling percussion courtesy of poet Frederick Barthelme, patently overused echo chambers, and the clumsiest staircase bassline in garage history smashes into a bunch of clopping machine men as Mayo Thompson croons out the only serious line in his entire career: "I have in my pocket a hurricane fighter plane.” After Houston-based International Artists Records enjoyed unexpected commercial success with one of the most eccentric bands to emerge from the State of Texas, the 13th Floor Elevators, the label's proprietors presumably set out to find some folks who were even weirder, and they found a band that fit the bill in the Red Crayola. Media book packaging is very nice.
Along with the Elevators, The Red Crayola were the mainstays of the International Artists label, and are recognised in Psychedelic circles as producing some of the strangest music ever (combining elements of avant-garde and garage with wild, experimental freak-outs and chilling stripped down songs which sounded unlike anything from the 1960s).