Frantic* – Conception

Swiftkick is the best coverband in the world. Go to Emmett, Kansas. Then roll a joint on this album cover. Then listen to The Doors.

Great album. Hot and heavy early 70s rock. Amazing sounding copy!

Seems Jenell has come to this one too, doing her rounds of party pooping

Good album, good take on hey Joe their way of playing reminds me of stack waddy

Tell me you have nothing better to do than to listen to this album ...

You may call me a snob if you wish, you may also say I don’t know a thing about music, or at least this sort of heavy psych (?) metal that’s designed to elevate your heart beat, though tachycardia is nothing to trifle with. Merely looking at the cover art, there’s no way I can imagine that this is how these folks lived their lives, though, the MC5 were certainly out in left field, also living on the edge of a heart attack. The truth is, and this is where the snobbery comes in, I feel rather uneducated listening to this album, as if rock n’ roll is all about the noise, the density, the over exaggerated fuzz, the screaming, the relentless drumming and not the quality, and with that, I’m sure there was someone somewhere laughing saying, “These kids will buy anything!”

Originally know as the Frantics (with an s), this six piece band were bound in a kinship for the bizarre and outrageousness, or at least a series of communal bad acid trips, pulling out all the stops, even dishing out a day-glow gatefold sleeve that certainly looked strange under a backlight, though did little to comfort and warm anyone's nocturnal lysergic wanderings. This was music for speed-freaks, people who had nothing better to do during the late 60’s than to eat copious amounts of diet pills and snort meth that was so sour it had the potential to permanently distort faces … yet, what else would one expect from a band formed in Billings, Montana during the hazed summer of 1965.

The Frantic were not the only ones traveling down this demented path, though I often wonder, what’s the decision making process that would lead one’s hand to Conception, and what element of the human psyche this music was channeled to. I firmly believe that there is a defining moment during a seminal period of most individual's development, where what they hear around them becomes their taste … I feel fortunate to have bypassed the likes of Blue Cheer and Frantic, as it all came across as silly and obnoxious to me then, and even more-so today. But hey, I was just a girl in fringed jacket with a vial full of Sandoz Blue and not diet pills, so what did I know. Though I will say that it’s amazing what shoddy production, no talent and a single watered down idea can create.

*** Now I can sell my original copy, an endless series of labored covers, a copy that was left in my apartment by some poor soul and never played.

Review by Jenell Kesler