Any illusions that might still be clung to along the order of Spirit's being an Epic house organ anthropomorphization-of-eclecticism shuck, complete with baldpated, cerebral - looking leftover from the bongo drums and black beret era, should be flushed down the old metaphysical crapper as quickly as one would dispose of just so much Nathan's ® chicken chow mein sandwich puke, because this here Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus (a hep reference to William Castle's great 1963 horror flick Mr. Sardonicus, which was about this mick who had his face paralyzed by banshees into a super-hideous grin when he crashed his father's casket to get a winning lottery ticket out of the old
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geezer's jacket pocket and then went around wearing this creepy plastic mask and bringing women down his cellar to ball except you should've seen the shit that went down whenever he would take off the mask) lay languidly upon the very steps to Parnassus.
Sure, this platter has its share of miscarriages: the embarrassing attempt at a 60-second poetico-emotional knockout (in "Why Can't I Be Free?") with the limp, hack-oid quatrain, "I don't know what it means to be free/And I cry when you say that you can't free me/I just can't go on/Why can't I be free?" the modal satire a clef of which hasn't been witnessed since the Vanilla Fudge bared their souls to God on "Season of the Witch"; there's a frail stab at some dumb kind of sincere-indictment-of-society/Brechtian rock contrivance ("Mr. Skin"); and there's a worthless ditty with a lot of dipshit psychedelic oscillations called "Space Child" (which does, however, have a very tuff dispersal of melodic ostinato at the end). Plus your usual quota of random "bay-beeeeeee's" scattered about at your usual supercilious x-y's.
But to badmouth this LP on account of its shortcomings is like chastising the child for watering the rhubarb but forgetting to buy the bacon; such, in sooth, are its apexes.
For this reviewer's money, "Nothin' To Hide" is the real humdinger of the set. A beautiful train of expiation-babble that includes such items as the murky, ambiguous incantation of a refrain, "We've got nothing to hide/Married to the same bride," recurring references to various surreal things lurking "in your pants," Baudelairean imperatives to drink allot of beer, and the totally contextually off-the-wall anal/deadpan "fuck" followed by the equally et cetera "seven o'clock" in kitschy three-part harmony during the fulcrum of a really neat guitar solo. There's even this killer Latin reed cuivre movement at the tag that's one pure shot of God's own medicine. Spirit also does, in this their latest effort, the first up-tempo song about biochemical deformation ("Animal Zoo") since the Fugs' "Mutant Stomp" that you can really cut a rug to ("Something went wrong/Why, you're much too fat and a little too long"). There's also a groovy bossa nova about death ("Nature's Way"). And lots more.
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