Diggers' Delight: 10 International Psychedelic Freakouts, 1970-1975

We Say...

Review by Dan Epstein

San Francisco's underground scene might have observed "The Death of the Hippie" in early 1967, but the lysergic seeds planted during the original psychedelic era would continue to flower and mutate in unexpected ways and locations for years to come. Digger's Delight: 10 International Psychedelic Freakouts, 1970-1975 is pretty much what it claims to be — a ten-pack of fried-synapse weirdness from foreign lands, recorded by artists seemingly unaware that the English-speaking music world was already moving on to hard rock, glam and disco. To be fair, though, some of these folks were gettin' hip to the heaviness; "Drugs," a 1972 track from German band Gift, Piel Del Pueblo's "Ven" (Argentina, 1972) and Evolution's "Dr. Vasquez"(Spain, 1970) are all tasty explosions of speaker-shredding distortion and rampaging drums, not a million miles from what the Pretty Things and Rare Earth were doing at the time. Psych aficionados yearning for the darker side of the mushroom will dig the flute-laced early-'70s Spanish meditations of Musica Dispersa's "Hanilo" and Pan & Regaliz's "Waiting in the Monsters Garden," while those with a yen for low-budget space travel might prefer the extended organ-stoked insanity of Pau Riba's "Ars Er" (Spain, 1971) and Lula Cortes E Ze Ramalho's "Nas Paredes Da Pedra Encantada" (Brazil, 1975). Perhaps the only cut that doesn't really fit in on this killer comp is Asha Bhosle & Rahul Dev Burman's "Duniya Mein Logon Ko" — not that the 1972 track isn't wonderful, but it's more classic big-band Bollywood than electric kool-aid acid test.