Recording information: The SOund Factory, Hollywood, CA.
When is an Electric Prunes album not really an Electric Prunes album? The Electric Prunes scored a pair of hits in 1967, "I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night)" and "Get Me to the World on Time," but after their second album yielded no singles, the group's producer Dave Hassinger (who controlled their record deal) and manager Lenny Poncher (who owned the group's name) decided the Prunes should try something more ambitious, and they brought in arranger and composer David Axelrod to help. By the time Hassinger and Axelrod were done, they had cooked up the first psychedelic/Catholic crossover project, the concept album Mass in F Minor, and the Prunes barely appeared on their own album, with a small army of other musicians brought in to help tackle Axelrod's tricky arrangements (most of the members of the band didn't read music). Exactly how the Prunes were supposed to score a hit with a set of downbeat tone poems featuring lyrics in Latin is lost to history, but after the last of the original Prunes had said farewell, Hassinger and Axelrod stepped forward with another religious concept piece, an album based on the Kol Nidre called Release of an Oath. This two-fer reissue pairs up these curiosities on one disc, and while Mass in F Minor sounds marginally more like the Prunes than Release of an Oath, with its fuzz and wah-wah-infused guitars and Farfisa organ lines bobbing in and out of the arrangements (it even earned a bit of FM radio play after the interpretation of "Kyrie Eleison" made it onto the Easy Rider soundtrack), Release of an Oath is the better album, as Axelrod explores more ambitious musical landscapes, and the string and horn arrangements mesh better with the occasional guitar freakouts (courtesy of Howard Roberts). If you have any interest in the Hassinger/Axelrod "Electric Prunes" albums, this is the way to go (especially since Release of an Oath is less than 25 minutes long, making it a poor stand-alone value), but if your main interest is the fuzztone sneer of "I Had Too Much to Dream," this is a period in the Prunes timeline you might as well ignore. ~ Mark Deming
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