Onion

"Chinese White"-surreal, love the bowed gimbri
"No Sleep Blues"-funny lyrics.Do you just to snore?
"Blues For The Muse"-the best song on the album, bluesy and great, Mike harmonica and Robin's lyrics are perfect!
"The Hedgehog's Song"-Mike, you've got quite the sense of humor. I keep imagining Sonic the hedgehog in this.
"First Girl I Loved"-their best known song, beautiful.
"Way Back In The 1960s"-great way to end the album! Love the lyrics!
You need this album, verrry bad.

ONE OF 'THE' GROUNDBREAKING RECORDINGS OF THE 1960s.......2003-03-10

With the release of their eponymous first album, the Incredible String Band made it know to the music listening public that a new force had arrived - one which would inject some energy and vitality into the folk music scene in the UK and the world. With the appearance of this album, THE 5,000 SPIRITS or THE LAYERS OF THE ONION, there could be little doubt that something special had been born. The albums which were to follow over the next few years bore this out dramatically.

THE 5,000 SPIRITS was released originally in 1967 - at the height of the psychedelic music movement. One only has to look at the artists of the day, and their releases, to see the rapidly expanding imaginations and creativity at work, breaking new ground right and left. This album, I feel, stands head and shoulders above most other releases of its day, in many ways - it should be regarded as a classic for its lyrical content alone. Musically, the ISB were going places - and drawing from sources - that other artists would only dare to touch in years to come. I believe it was their long-time producer, Joe Boyd, who once said that the ISB was the original `world music' group - he couldn't have stated it better.

After the critical acclaim garnered by their first album, the trio (at the time composed of Robin Williamson, Mike Heron and Clive Palmer) split up and traveled separately. The music Robin and Mike heard (for the band had become a duo by the time this album was recorded) around the world touched their souls - they breathed it in and gave it back to there listeners, combining both vocal and instrumental styles and techniques that would most like never have met if not for their artistic explorations. Mike had begun playing the sitar, and Robin's singing clearly bears the influence of the voices he encountered in the Middle East and Asia. The two writers' heads were already bursting with poetry and ideas born in their native lands - myths from Europe and Asia mingled with other images, creating a heady concoction perfectly suited to the times. Listeners were eager to hear something new - something besides the standard pop fare of the day, love songs with `moon/June/spoon' rhymes. The ISB gave it to them in abundance.

The album is pretty evenly balanced between the two writers - an equity which would be present in most of their subsequent releases as well. Licorice McKechnie makes her first appearance with Robin and Mike on this recording - and they are assisted by Danny Thompson on bass here and there. The songs deal with a variety of subjects - even the aforementioned love songs are present, but in the ISB's own unique style.

The set opens with Mike's `Chinese white' - the bowed gimbri played by Robin on this track lets the listener know right away that things have `expanded' a bit since the band's 1966 release. `The bent twig of darkness grows the petals of the morning', sings Mike - a beautiful image worthy of traditional Asian poetry. Mike's other songs on this album run the gamut from love songs (`Painting box' and the eternally lovely `Gently tender') to humorous looks at our place in the world (`Little cloud' and `The hedgehog's song') to a song offering encouragement to the listener to reach for his full potential (`You know what you could be'). The seriousness of some of his topics is gently offset by a childlike quality that, through the ensuing years, would infuse most of his writing with an innocence that would endear it to his fans.

Robin's offerings here are for the most part more serious than Mike's - but there is humor in his writing as well, as is evidenced by `No sleep blues' and the hilarious `Way back in the 1960s'. His `First girl I loved' - covered by Judy Collins as `First boy I loved' on her WILDFLOWERS album - is simply one of the most beautiful songs ever written to a first love, looking back with honesty and tenderness on the gifts exchanged, both physical and emotional. His guitar work on this song - and, actually, throughout his career - is astonishingly creative and lovely. In 'The eyes of fate', he muses `O who can see in the eyes of Fate all life alone in its chronic pattern?' - his lyrics are, throughout this album and all to follow, insightful, probing, spiritual. He is one of the most amazingly talented writers ever to pen a verse.

There are a couple of places in the recording where the signal is over-driven - but that's to be expected, given the era from which this dates. The remastering has been done lovingly - the sound on the cd is as good or better than any edition of the lp I ever owned.

Anyone with any sort of appreciation for the musics of different parts of the world, of exploring the myths with which mankind has explained the unexplainable, who has ever asked the really deeply rooted, `half-remarkable' questions, will find in the music and lyrics of the Incredible String Band the voices of kindred spirits of the closest order. This album - and, indeed, everything they released up until about 1970 (and they produced a lot of music in that short span) - is as beautiful and relevant today as when it first appeared. Moreover, there are still those who will never `catch up' to them.

The band continued to experiment and expand into the follow-up album, THE HANGMAN'S BEAUTIFUL DAUGHTER, issued the following year...

Groundbreaking Album From Incredible String Band.......2001-12-11

In 1966 the Incredible String Band completed their first album simply titled "The Incredible String Band." Upon the completion of the album, the band made a curious career move...they retired. The principal members felt that they had reached their pinnacle of acheivement and decided to get out of the music business. Banjoist Clive Plamer headed for Afganistan, while multi-instumentalist Robin Williamson travelled to Morocco to learn to play Moroccan flute. Only Mike Heron remained in Edinburg Scotland, (the group's home) where he gigged with the rock band Rock Bottom and the Dead Beats. Robin stayed in Morrocco about six months and returned to Scotland with dozens of exotic musical insturments. Together Robin and Mike reformed the Incredible String Band with Robin's girlfriend Licorice "Likkie" McKenzie. The new Incredible String Band recorded "5000 Spirits or the Layers of the Onion", which was released in 1967, the year of Sgt. Pepper's and the Summer of Love. This album with it's strange musical alchemy, surreal lyrics, and gentle whimsy placed the String Band in the vangaurd of the burgeoning psychedelic movement in Europe and the USA. The ISB counted amoung it's fans Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Led Zepplin and Steve Winwood. The album is a ground breaking soundtrack of psycedelica's Age of Innocence and charted the course for the development of the String Band until 1972, when the group's increasing involvement in the Scientology movement caused a creative implosion.

The first thing you notice about "5000 Spirits or the Layers of the Onion" is it's arresting mystical day-glow cover art by Simon Marijke. Marijke was the painter of the fabled psychedelic Rolls Royce owned by John Lennon. The cover art broke with traditional notions what kind of art should grace the cover of an album. If you saw this album in a record store bin in 1967, you would indeed know that "something's happening here."

The talented Mike Heron and Robin Williamson played about 40 different musical insturments between them. Exotic intruments like the sitar, hand drums, gimbri and the jew's harp were featured on "5000 Spirits", giving the music the feel of a cosmic global stew. The surrealistic lyrics inspired by eastern mysticism, American blues, celtic lore, and pagan mytholology transported the listener to a paralell reality akin to Tolkien's Middle Earth. With "5000 Spirits" two powerful voices with distinct visions emerged as one: Mike Heron's gentle pantheism rooted in folk traditions and Robin Williamson's cosmic and often elegalic mysticism blended the Celtic bardist tradition.

Some of Mike's most memorable songwritting is on "5000 Spirits. On "Painting Box" Mike's gentle voice blends with Likkie's waifish harmony to produce a delicate impressionistic gem about love and the beauty of imagination. Mike's worship of nature is apparent in "Little Cloud", where a passing cloud beckons him to float to distant lands. Many of ISB's chemically fuelled devotees interpreted "Little Cloud" as invitation to pass through doors of perception via a certain substance often licked from blotter sheets in the sixties. Robin Williamson's "First Girl I Loved" is a melancholy reflection on "a grown-up female stranger" who at age 17 was his first love. Robin's plantive voice rises from his intimate Galeic conversational tone to a mornful atonal Arabic wail as he recounts thinking of his first love in the "six sad morning and in the lonely midnight." The song is the most requested and most recorded in Williamson's considerable body of work. When Judy Collins heard the ISB perform "First Girl I Loved" on tour together, she changed the gender to "First Boy" and it is a favorite of her fans. Jackson Browne recorded it on "Rubaiyat" which was a Elektra tribute to the Striggers. Robin's other masterpiece was "My Name Is Death" an existential bow to the inevitabilty of death, "the question that cannot be answered."

"Five Thousand Spirits or the Layer of the Onion" is a flat-out Sixties classic and the first milestone the long pilgrimage of the Incredible Sting Band. It is a pilgrimage that appears to never end... Robin Williamson made the 2001 best of [...]music critics list for his stunning C.D., "The Seed-At-Zero." Mike Heron and Robin Williamson recently reformed the Incredible String Band and are touring the U.K. in October, November and December of 2001. Likkie McKenzie the third Sting Band member on this album moved to California in the 1970s where she worked as a waitress and coat checker. About 10 years ago, Likkie, in the cosmic String Band fashion, set out on a journey across the desert in Arizona, and was never seen or heard from again.

Know Your Onion
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Know Your Onion
The Shins
Manufacturer: Sub Pop
ProductGroup: Music
Binding: Audio CD

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ASIN: B000060KAM
Release Date: 2002-06-04