Plain and Fancy: Endle St. Cloud - Thank You All Very Much (1969 us, fascinating freaky psych rock, 2009 hardleeve bonus tracks remaster)

Monday, June 26, 2023

Endle St. Cloud - Thank You All Very Much (1969 us, fascinating freaky psych rock, 2009 hardleeve bonus tracks remaster)

Endle St Cloud’s bizarre one-off album from 1969 was the last LP released by legendary Texan label International Artists. Signed to the post-Lelan Rogers IA, towards the end of the label’s golden years of 1966-70, the decidedly oddball Endle St Cloud very much belong to the second tier of IA outfits to emerge in the wake of the label’s top-selling act, 13th Floor Elevators.

Fronted by the vocal and piano-playing talents of the singular Endle himself, and including members of IA stablemates Lost & Found among their line-up, there’s never any escaping the fact that this is one off-the-wall listen (the tracklisting includes Professor Black and Laughter, both originally written for the second Lost & Found LP that never was). Much of this oddball flavour comes from the fact that the album is sequenced with a series of surreal piano and vocal vignettes introducing each of the album’s eight tracks, which themselves jump around a spectrum of styles ranging from vaudeville and country to pop and rock.

This limited digibook reissue also includes both sides of them band’s memorably psyched-out 1968 debut single, Tell Me One More Time (What’s Happening To Our World), recorded as Endle St Cloud In The Rain.

by Grahame Bent, 16 October 2009