New Album From Mushroom: Psychedelic Mood Music

With younger baby boomers getting older, and the Elvis generation still older, it is predictable that the former group has gotten a soft spot in their hearts about those fleeting hippie days. . . that five minute summer of love and the long aftermath of disco designer jeans and Ronald Reagan notwithstanding. As a member of that group I have long felt the pull of the short-lived counter-culture, especially in its cultural efflorescence as psychedelic rock.

Mushroom gives you a kind of mood music for a would-be love in. It's a San Francisco collective and their twelfth (!) album is just out: Naked, Stoned & Stabbed (4 Zero/Royal Potato Family).

Now don't get me wrong, this is music that takes its role seriously. The mellotron, dron-ish jams, guitars, sitars, and the like come together for an hour's worth of mostly instrumental music. It's almost like you get the jam endings from a number of would-be rock albums of the period. All I can say is it really is time to take this musical era seriously and Mushroom takes what was positive about the music of that time and does something with it that is pleasant and not insubstantial. There isn't quite as much of the "heavy" feedback drenched sounds of the era, but others do that and so that's cool.

This is music that mellows you out. And it's fun too.