Skip Bifferty – Skip Bifferty

The photo of the back cover in this entry looks like it was hand-colored with a magic marker. I have a copy of this press and the image is in black and white as it is with all other pressings. This photo should be replaced and I will try to do that.

This orange-label RCA stereo variant of Skip Bifferty is supposedly a different mix from the black-label stereo variant.

Buy this over the Acme reissue. The sound quality is substantially better - the Acme reissue uses denoisers heavily!

I might've committed a cardinal sin, but I was so unimpressed with this reissue that I replaced it with an older bootleg of the album. The sound quality on this is just awful - way too heavy on the digital audio reduction - it's sad but the bootleg I picked up sounds BETTER

Actually a really good sounding bootleg! Sounds better than the Acme vinyl reissue (which used lots of digital audio restoration)

Blossoming in 1967 from members of The Chosen, who were a rhythm and blues band, Skip Bifferty has that early quirky Syd Barrett Pink Floyd psychedelic vibe going on [though a bit less frenetic], laced with a good measure of Mr. Fantasy by Traffic [though pre-dating Traffic’s release by six months], along with Love and The Zombies, where their music laps like small waves at your feet, filled with unpretentious hooks and pop enthusiasm that walks close to the progressive sounds of the era … yet is also punctuated at times with the fledgling heavy metal vocals. This release did gain a short time following, primarily due to their live shows at the Marquee Club, though bands with more presence layering and imagination soon quickly moved Skip Bifferty to the nearly forgotten rack.

If Skip Bifferty suffered from any short comings it was that their music was all over the map, nearly undefinable, and while that certainly could have been an asset, when their hard rocking numbers were smacked up against more fuzz and atmospheric tracks, nearly every song stands in stark juxtaposition to the others, leaving the album lacking in a contextual attitude, one where the listener could easily move through the material without feeling that they were being jostled as each new number begins.

I realized that I haven’t made this album sound very good, and truth be told, the release is about average, though is certainly essential for anyone wishing to create a musical timeline from those psychedelic days. Skip Bifferty did possess creative production techniques that were very much in and of the moment, including effected vocals, multiple strings, backwards guitars and phasing … yet as important as I feel this release is, it’s that their cleverness seems to exist for the sake of cleverness alone. Now, that being said, there were many bands during this decade who tossed nearly everything into the pot, leaving listeners a bit over whelmed as to exactly what was going on, meaning that bands who managed to control their cleverness, or allowed it to sound natural, quickly rose to the top. But that doesn’t mean that there’s nothing here to be explored or to be discovered, you should listen and decide for yourself, it’s just that Skip Bifferty was a one trick pony who delivered their best material as singles, and simply could not find the right chords or attitudes to move them into the mainstream.

Review by Jenell Kesler