Cartoon titled "Lincoln and his Cabinet" from The Only Authentic Life of Abraham Lincoln, 1864
I wrote last week about the passing of the Free Design's Chris Dedrick, and I mentioned my love for '60s soft rock and sunshine pop. Harpers Bizarre is a band that I've been curious about for a long time - I heard their version of Jim Pepper's "Witchi Tai To" on a blog a couple years ago, and the sound was intriguing. I did a little research, and it seemed like most people were pretty "meh" on Harpers Bizarre (e.g. the Allmusic write-ups of their albums). I noticed recently, though, that the Harpers Bizarre records were on sale cheap from Sundazed as part of their ongoing "garage" sale, so I grabbed a couple of them. The band's fourth album, Harpers Bizarre 4 is the one that comes closest to what I was hoping the band would sound like - not surprisingly, it's the album that "Witchi Tai To" comes from.
4 is a mix of covers and originals, and it's missing some of the strong contributions the band had from Randy Newman and Van Dyke Parks on their debut record. Instead, their covers include better-known songs like the Beatles' "Blackbird" and John Denver's "Leaving on a Jet Plane". These songs are beautifully arranged with a soft-psych sound, and the group's layered vocal sound is a good match for the hazy production. A few of the numbers are a little jarring, like the lite-blues-rock of the Templeton-Scoppettone original "Soft Soundin' Music", ironically the song with the hardest sound on the album, and the strangely soft-pedaled cover of Otis Redding's "Hard to Handle". But, overall, the album has a pleasantly soporific feel to it.
One of the factors contributing to 4's sleepy vibe is the chantlike quality of many of the songs. The cover of Eddie Floyd's "Knock on Wood" sets the tone at the beginning of the album, and "Witchi Tai To", bonus track "Poly High" (by Harry Nilsson) and two Templeton-Scoppettone originals in the album's second half have this kind of sleepy, repetitive sound as well. My favorite is still "Witchi Tai To", which has a mesmerizing arrangement that slowly builds and thickens with repetition. I love the jingling bells that are high in the mix, adding a contrasting sound to the peyote-smeared chanting underneath. It's a little like the sound palette the Animal Collective has been working with lately, actually.
"Witchi Tai To" by Harpers Bizarre
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