Seriously impressive third outing for the ’60s folk/psychedelia supergroup.
As is often the case, an initial modest music idea can sometimes really blossom into something special. That’s what’s happened for the embarrassingly talented collection of musicians that make up The Third Mind. In 2020, ex-Blasters guitarist Dave Alvin, bassist Victor Krummenacher (Camper Van Beethoven, Cracker), drummer Michael Jerome (Richard Thompson, John Cale), guitarist David Immergluck (Counting Crows, John Hiatt), and singer/songwriter Jesse Sykes (Jesse Sykes & The Sweet Hereafter) decided to record an album. This was a free-form, unscripted session with the unifying theme of a love for all things ’60s music and psychedelic sounds.
The reaction to this debut from all musical corners was incredibly positive and complimentary. So, from an initial off-the-cuff idea, we now have a third selection of carefully chosen, mainly cover songs, and a goal to reinterpret them in sonically explosive ways. As Alvin has said, “It’s five musicians walking a tightrope, improvising in dialogue with each other and finding the songs in real time.” The album’s songs include covers of tracks by Elizabeth Cotton, Otis Rush, Pharoah Sanders, and Mimi & Richard Farafina. So this definitely isn’t “Now That’s What I Call a Sixties Pop Album”.
We open with a take on Fred Neil’s 1966 cover of Elizabeth Cotton’s ‘Shake Sugaree’ which starts dreamily and quietly before building to a blistering sonic explosion and back again – with Alvin’s masterful and deft guitar work brilliantly effective. There’s a cover of the murder ballad ‘Pretty Polly’ which Judy Collins had previously covered and again mixes the initial laid back vocals of Sykes, before changing tack with a Neil Young style guitar frenzy – really powerful stuff. There’s a lovely original included, ‘Before We Said Goodbye’, a slow, almost dreamlike song, with shades of Santana ringing throughout.
The most ‘commercial’ of the tracks is a fantastic cover of ‘Reno, Nevada’ by Mimi & Richard Fariña, and here we have Sykes and Alvin sharing vocal duties really effectively, making it the strongest track of the set. With most of the songs lasting around the 6/7 minute mark, there isn’t much room for sonic variety here, but that’s not the point. This is another magnificent collection of great songs with the band’s distinctive and highly polished take on them. They recorded the songs in a circle and in only a few takes for each song. This really does demonstrate how great their musicality is, and passion oozes out of every track.
Sykes’s vocal delivery might sound a little too ‘distinctive’ for some ears, but this is still a masterful set of amazing covers showing these musicians at the pinnacle of their abilities. Superb stuff.
