180. Love, "Forever Changes"

 


I'm afraid I'm going to have to file this in the "critically adored but not for me" pile because I know this album is revered as a psychedelic masterpiece and "an album of awesome intensity and tenderness" and "ambitious and prescient, reflecting the cultural shift of the dying ’60s, while tapping into the paranoia that would soon permeate much of American culture in the next decade," but I do not love it.  OK then!  I'm just not that into you.

I know the album is supposed to be a dark look at the hippy summer of love culture, but it often seems like a hamhanded attempt to copy that ethos.  Take "The Daily Planet," for example:

Down on Go-stop Boulevard it
Never fails to bring me down
The sirens and the accidents and
For a laugh there's Plastic Nancy
She's real fancy with her children
They'll go far, she
Buys them toys to
Keep in practice
Waiting on the war

Groovy, man.  The songs are all very twee and complicated and draw in jazz and psychedelia and, whatever, let's throw some marimba in there too.  A lot of it sounds like the Who in their psych phase.

Now, I did not hate it as much this chick did (a fun read, if you like to read bad reviews as much as I do - "the overdubs sound more like the music that accompanies television commercials than credible artistic contributions. What I hear on Forever Changes is an American band trying very hard to sound like a mid-60’s British band and failing miserably" GET 'EM GIRL), it just left me flat.  I feel nothing. 

Does this album deserve to be in the Top 500? According to everyone but me and that girl who I linked to.

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