Monster Island: From the Michigan Floor LP
Psych/folk songs about authors and artists, features members of Destroy All Monsters, Outrageous Cherry, His Name is Alive and Godzuki, a combination of acoustic and electric instruments, vinyl 33 1/3 rpm with 20 page silkscreened lyric booklet and full color collage cover, (partially shown here), as new in resealable plastic cover. Recorded in 1995, pressed in `1997, with very few copies remaining from an edition of 500 printed as a split release from Ecstatic Peace!/Father Yod, and The End is Here.From the Michigan Floor was Monster Island’s first release.
[Please Note: We will try and supply a lyric booklet when ordered. About half of the original 500 copies of the lyric book were destroyed in a flood. Booklets were illustrated with drawings by William Blake and Erika Hoffman]
“Cary Loren, founding member of seminal ’70s anti-rock outfit Destroy All Monsters (which, at one point, included former Stooges guitarist Ron Asheton and former MC5 bassist Michael Davis), emerges on this 1998 release showing his psychedelic roots. From the Michigan Floor is a period piece, and the period, stylistically, is somewhere between 1967 and 1970. Full-fledged psychedelic revivalism going on here, bathed in sitars, bells, vague religious musings, and even a reference to the Kent State shootings. Beginning with “Lady of Shalot” (adapted from a Tennyson poem), Loren’s acoustic guitar and gruff vocal delivery (which sounds almost identical to Giant Sand’s Howe Gelb) weave through 11 songs about death, Jesus, war, magic mirrors, and Japanese movie monsters with such conviction that it doesn’t take much suspension of disbelief to imagine this album is some lost psych-rock gem. The warm production of Warren Defever (from His Name is Alive) helps matters, as does the sitar playing of Outrageous Cherry member Matt Smith, who appears almost throughout the album. Erika Hoffman of Godzuki is also featured prominently, singing and playing violin and bells. Highlights include the ironic “Happy Girl,” sung by Hoffman in a Nico-esque deadpan accompanied by head-bobbing handclaps and shakers, and the following track, “Blue Revolution (Yves Klein),” which somehow makes lyrics like “the void shot out a flame from the heart of the earth” make sense. Overall, the album is pretty mellow and subtle; no fuzz guitar freakouts really. Rather, Loren chooses to explore the folkier side of psych with From the Michigan Floor. Similar in tone to albums by other latter-day psych revivalists like Bardo Pond, In Gowan Ring, and Bent Leg Fatima.”
–Jason Nickey, All Music
Monster Island is a psychedelic-folk band founded in 1995, at Alvin’s venue in Detroit. Early members included: Cary Loren, Matthew Smith, Erica Hoffman Dilloway, Warren Defever, Wade and Efe Bes. They have released five albums.
$ 50.00
In stock
