First off, sorry folks. I don't have a scanner or really any other tech shit like that so I had to take these with the trife macro setting on my digital point & shoot. The quality suffers, true.
This one is a pretty short little number clocking in at about 28 minutes with 8 tracks. Most of the album is truthfully pretty pedestrian. The songs are sub par psychedelic folk tunes with repetitive licks. The real significance of this album is that it includes the earliest recording I could find (granted this is not a definitive statement on the progression of this song) of Shin Jung Hyun's masterpiece "Beautiful Country" or sometimes referred to as "Beautiful Korea." The song itself has an interesting history. The song was a response to President Park Chung Hee's request that the S. Korean rock legend write a song praising the president's grandeur. SJH flatly refused and instead wrote a song praising his country. The song is pretty epic. The version on this album is one of the shorter ones I have come across, clocking in at 7:56. Most versions of the song seem to hover around 8-10 minutes long. While the version on Vol. 2 is probably my least favorite and most straight forward, it is still an amazing accomplishment and it is no wonder SJH continued to rework and revisit this song throughout his career. The song is punctuated by long, groovy psychout guitar solo's, beautiful vocals, and a wonderfully circular song structure. The song conjures images of Korean hippies spinning around atop a beautiful pastoral hillside until they fall down only to stay on the ground and stare at shape shifting clouds. Totally Epic. Totally Rad.
1 comment:
sounds tight. Pro-blogger-tip: just increase the light hitting those cds and you should be a little better off. The refrig (do they have those there?) makes a pretty good studio (kidding)
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