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Food

Forever Is a Dream

(Fallout; US: 16 Nov 2006; UK: 6 Nov 2006)

Food, a relatively obscure Chicago group who released their only album, Forever Is a Dream, in 1969, gets the reissue treatment from Fallout; and though the recording quality’s inevitably dated, this QUIET album of soft-edged psychedelic rock offers a varied palate of pleasures. Psychedelia has been played and played out, so it’s difficult to evaluate this with fresh ears: even so, the smallest of signifiers immediately sets us off—a slight wobble at the end of a melody, in the flute or the trumpet. The bending communicates that pastoral melody is imperfect, and it’s a metaphor that sticks. Just listen to Asteroid #4 and compare. But Forever Is a Dream is inescapably a debut album. “What It Seems to Be” blossoms into a full-sounding orchestral ballad, shouting out with the kind of abandon you associate with ‘90s indie.  However, “Coming Back” and a few other tracks have an amateurish air, like the band’s searching, not quite reaching, a fully-worked out song. Simplicity still carries the day… “Lady Miss Ann” reminds strongly of Simon & Garfunkel, but then again so does Tobias Freiberg. If they had stuck around, Food may have proven themselves a band worth that ‘cult’ label.

Rating:

Dan Raper has been writing about music for PopMatters since 2005. Prior to that he did the same thing for his college newspaper and for his school newspaper before that. Of course he also writes fiction, though his only published work is entitled "Gamma-secretase exists on the plasma membrane as an intact complex that accepts substrates and effects intramembrane cleavage". He is currently studying medicine at the University of Sydney, Australia.


Tagged as: food
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