Halcyon Magazine

BY SASHA LEE

Release Date: Feb 17, 2009

Brooklyn’s Weird Owl recently signed to Tee Pee records and are readying to release their debut album, “Ever The Silver Cord Be Loosed.” Their sound pays homage to Neil Young’s earlier electrified work with Crazy Horse, before a man needed a maid or despaired the needle and the damage done. In particular, parts recall to mind Neil Young’s album “On The Beach,”– it wouldn’t surprise me if these guys were imbibing the notorious “Honey Slides” (sauteed pot in honey cooked on the stove) that were heavily consumed during that album- and made slide guitarist Rusty Kershaw think he was a python hissing on the floor around  Neil Young’s legs. Actually, that being said,  Weird Owl sort of sounds exactly like Rusty Kershaw dropping his slide guitar and instead slithering around like a drugged out riff hovering around Neil’s legs. Their slippy, trippy hints at punishing riffs mixed with certain hallucinatory softness (like they’re too fucked up to punch you in the gut the way Sabbath would) push them more in the direction of Hawkwind. Like 13th Floor Elevators sinister cover of “Its All Over Now Baby Blue,” slowing the tempo to a frightening mushroom-induced halt, Weird Owl sounds as if they’re stretching some sort of southern rock folk and resituating it within a Dead Meadow.

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BY DANIEL HARJU

Right before they unexpectedly morphed into the Electric Light Orchestra, Jeff Lynne, Roy Wood and Bev Bevan reached their musical apex together as the Move with the 1971 album Message From the Country. This video is some TV singback performance. The song is called “Words of Aron” and is off of this, their album as the Move. Notice the mildly eccentric Roy, the bearded multi-instumentalist in the yellow suit. Wood would go on to become Wizard, the brain behind the outlandish everything-but-the-kitchen-sink glam band. This song by Jeff Lynne (that genial Birminghamite who gave the world loads of Beatles-inspired classic cheese such as Rockaria, Calling America, Telephone Line) is phenomenal but also sounds light-years from what the group would do only a few years later as ELO. Quasimodo playing the bass flute is actually Bill Hunt, who would later become an ELO member.   

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"Grain of Sand"

Marti Klarwein is a visionary painter whose hallucinogenic mandala like visions are otherworldly and amazing. His psychedelic aesthetic was derived entirely without drugs too- simply from reaching within his waking mind. Among other designs, he did the album artwork for Miles Davis’ seminal double album Bitches Brew, among other works. 

His subject matter ranges from divine goddesses, the cosmos, imaging the astral body (both asleep and awake) and heavenly bikers below mountains of vast scale. 

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