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Anteater · 02-21-2011, 09:01 PM

Linda Perhacs – Parallelograms (1970)

Better late than never!!

1. Chimacum Rain (3:33)
2. Paper Mountain Man (3:13)
3. Dolphin (2:56)
4. Call Of The River (3:51)
5. Sandy Toes (3:00)
6. Parallelograms (4:36)
7. Hey, Who Really Cares? (2:44)
8. Moons And Cattails (4:09)
9. Morning Colors (4:48)
10. Porcelain Baked-Over Cast-Iron Wedding (4:01)
11. Delicious (4:08)
12. If You Were My Man (2:59)
13. I Would Rather Love (3:06)

So yeah, I'm kicking my 70's thread back off with a dizzyingly good one-shot from that ever musically fertile land of California. Linda Perhacs is often said to be the "Joni Mitchell who never was", and that's about as true a statement as one I've ever run across.

To elaborate: Parallelograms, this obscure woman's one and only record that hit shelves in 1970 and was subsequently ignored, is a psychedelic folk masterpiece that is heads and shoulders above even some of the best records in the genre. Why, you may ask? Well, for starters, Linda's voice is one of those short-lived epitomes of esoteric beauty, an arcane instrument that seems hardwired to carry forlorn abstractions into the minds of those who let it in.

Most importantly however, although a gripping stripped down experience in fragility for the most part where an acoustic guitar, some light percussion and Linda's voice reign supreme, there is an occasionally noticeable streak of impenetrable experimental ebony that leers in the hollows of a number of these arrangements, such as the Brainticket-esque title track and its followup, a harbinger of endless isolation locked in two and a half minutes called 'Hey, Who Really Cares?'.

For me, these two tracks are the heart and soul of Linda's languid songwriting, and that's saying quite a bit considering how strong all thirteen songs are across the board. In particular, compositions such as 'Morning Colors' and 'Chimacum Rain' are toe-to-toe with the best of Mitchell's infamous Blue, and that's about as high a praise as I could give anything from 1970. Because if you weren't Joni Mitchell or Karen Carpenter in 1970, you were going to have a helluva hard time making it as a successful songstress in an industry that was ultimately male-dominated.

Unlike a lot of people across the Interwebz, I don't throw around the term "masterpiece" too often when it comes to psychedelic music...party because so much of the stuff that came out throughout the late 60's sounded very derivative of one another and partly because I have an ear for something that nails that hard-to-scratch sweet spot in terms of atmosphere.

Parallelograms, at least to these ears, is everything a real psychedelic fanatic should be looking for: spacey arrangements, led by Linda's monstrously beautiful set of pipes, and held together at the end of the day by an honest, sparse...yet rich production to make the whole shebang shine like something Van Gogh might have painted.