DONOVAN'S BRAIN
The Great Leap Forward (Career)
Reviewed by Alan Wright

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Like previous DB releases, this features group leader Ron Sanchez on various instruments, helped out by folks like Deniz Tek on guitar and vocals; Ron Craighead on drums and vocals; Jeffrey Arnsten on bass, guitar and lap steel; and a bunch of other folks. Their music is trippy, often slow and dreamy '60s style psychedelia. Besides jangly and sometimes fuzzed-out and backwards guitars, are things like weird burbles, organs and piano, acoustic guitars, bongos, and all manner of neat psychedelic effects. It never devolves into mindless hippie jamming that seems to plague much modern psych music. Some of it reminds me of the Orange Alabaster Mushroom, another mostly one-man project fleshed out by guests on some recordings and for live shows. Take, for instance, the Deniz Tek-sung "The Ballad Of Where's Jim," which makes for something quite different from Tek's usual rawk. Also really cool is "Loving Indifference," which sounds so much like Syd Barrett-period Pink Floyd - well, aside from the vocals - it's uncanny! The whole things sounds very "organic." Excellent stuff.

© 2003 - Alan Wright