Apryl Fool - The Apryl Fool (2010)

The Apryl Fool was a very accomplished late-'60s band from Japan whose lone, self-titled album is a great mixture of hard psych and blues-rock. Their best-known track is probably "The Lost Mother Land, Pt. 1," which was featured on the Japanese volume of QDK's Love, Peace and Poetry series, certainly one of the most crazed, over the top productions and performances in the entire series, with its massively phased and treated vocals and general menace. But that tune is really the anomaly on the album, despite the prevalence of monstrous fuzz guitar on a number of tracks. At their heart, the Apryl Fool seem to be a blues-rock band, although one that was clearly experimenting with the burgeoning psychedelic scene. Tracks like "Another Time," "Honky Tonk Jam," and Bob Dylan's "Pledging My Time" are pretty straight blues-rock, and "April Blues" just adds some fuzz guitar to a boogie-woogie piano bit. The other tracks up the psych quotient considerably, like on "Tomorrow's Child," with its Farfisa and wicked fuzz leads, or the aforementioned "The Lost Mother Land, Pt. 1." There are additional crazy tape effects on "The Lost Mother Land, Pt. 2." About half the tunes are in English and half in Japanese, but it's all good stuff. Historical footnote: years later, bass player Haruomi Hosono would become a member of one of Japan's most popular music groups ever, Yellow Magic Orchestra.