Ill Wind - Flashes [Remastered & Expanded] (2009)

From Boston, but light years away from the excesses of the notorious ‘Bosstown sound’, Ill Wind are revered as one of America’s best late 60s underground bands. Mixing taut acid rock with gorgeous ballads, and featuring outstanding guitar interplay and the beautiful vocals of Connie Devanney, Flashes is rightly regarded as one of the key artefacts of US psychedelia. Originally issued in the summer of 1968, and much bootlegged since, Sunbeam is delighted to announce its first proper reissue, prepared with the band’s full participation. The original album is accompanied by a second disc containing a plethora of superb contemporary bonus material, as well as a booklet featuring rare photographs and historical notes by the band’s founder and lead guitarist Ken Frankel, making the package truly essential for psych fans.

‘West-Coasty hippie-psycher that has to rank as one of the best Airplane epigons from anywhere, with a solid rocking backbone most of their competition lacks – great fluid guitar jams’ – The Acid Archives

‘A fine album, whose sound is moulded by Conny Devanney’s crystal-clear vocals. Strongly recommended’ – Fuzz, Acid & Flowers

Flashes does indeed have more flashes of potential than many of the countless other one-shot psychedelic albums of the late '60s, but this Boston group's sole effort is quite erratic, and not graced with much good material. The best points in their favor are the bracing vocals of Connie DeVanney, whether she's singing alone or blending with male voices in a manner reminiscent of (and probably highly influenced by) early Jefferson Airplane. But despite the presence of Tom Wilson at the production reins, the production often sounds underdeveloped, and the songs frequently meander in a derivative twilight between folk-rock and psychedelia. There are some fair driving folk-rockers in the 1967 Airplane style here, like "People of the Night" (with a lengthy Eastern-style psychedelic guitar break), "Hung-Up Chick," and "High Flying Bird," the last of them a folk song covered by numerous rockers in the last half of the 1960s, not least Jefferson Airplane themselves. "Dark World" is haunting folk-rock-psychedelia, and the best solo showcase for DeVanney's voice, while "Sleep" has some almost gothic male-female vocal interaction. But the album also has some overlong blues-rock noodling and psychedelic droning, mediocre good-time jug band-influenced stuff, and self-consciously heavy social commentary.