singemonkey wrote:
I confess that I only really know the 5000 Spirits and The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter. I don't have copies at the moment after the cassette that I copied from my buddy's dad's old LPs died a death. I must look to see if I can get reasonably priced CDs. Fantastic instrumentation, amazingly original. The whimsy of some of it will put a lot of people off, but it's really phenomenal stuff.
The early albums are available as a series of budget re-issues, two CDs in each package.
The two that you mention are their 2nd and 3rd albums and are packaged together. Many would regard those as being the peak of the ISB.
I have those two. I also have the first album ("The Incredible String Band") which is interesting but less focussed and not as rich, and the next two albums "Wee Tam" and "The Big Huge" (which were combined as a double album in some territories).
One of the most interesting things for me is the non-linear song structure that they would use - especially Robin Williamson. No repeating cycle of verse, chorus, verse, chorus...
The inventiveness is remarkable, and on the early albums there's an air of abandon and wildness that they lost later on.
They were ahead of their time really - World Music years before anybody even thought about such a thing, and not "world" as in "from this country" but as in taking influences from all over the place and melding them together into something unique.
