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Michele O'malley's Sole Album is an Unfairly Neglected West Coast Folk-psych Gem. Featuring the Involvement of Cult Legends Such as Curt Boettcher (Sagittarius, Millennium), Lowell George (Little Feat) and Elliott Ingber (Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart), It's a Dreamy Collection of Eastern-influenced West Coast Pop that Deserved to Achieve Much Greater Success on Its Original Release in 1969.

Saturn Rings, the one and only album by Michele (nee O’Malley), was released, ostensibly, to cut-out bins by ABC Records in 1969, the product of an ongoing, commercially-stalled dalliance with cult-figure producer/arranger/songwriter Curt Boettcher. O’Malley was a vocalist for the Ballroom, the pre-Millenium/Sagittarius project on Boettcher’s resume, and it seemed that Saturn Rings would be the sure-shot to get both the recognition they sought. The list of session players and studio magicians with their hands in this thing is fairly compelling, as well: witness Lowell George, pre-Little Feat; Elliot Ingber, Zappa/Beefheart collaborator; Bobby Notkoff, pre-Rockets and Neil Young sideman; Gordon Alexander (The Association); and Bobby Jameson (a.k.a. Chris Lucey, of Songs of Protest and Anti-Protest infamy). Said list in 2006 is as much a dream session for psych-pop heads as could be assembled, but in its proper moment, nobody knew.

A shame, then, as this is as mature and adventurous as hippy-dippy “lost” albums get. Michele’s vocal arrangements come straight from Boettcher, as do five of the album’s songs, either as writer or co-writer (“Spinning, Spinning, Spinning” was originally recorded as the A-side of the Ballroom’s lone single, as were two other tracks in here: “Musty Dusty” and “Would You Like to Go”). Given the recycling of earlier material, the new arrangements and recordings here give even the sappiest, folkiest material a much-needed facelift, with George’s trilling flute and Ingber’s roaming bluegrass-inflected guitar skirting all around the harpsichord and traps charts on “Spinning.” These tracks frame Michele’s versatile voice and respectable range, able to hollow out for soulful, Laura Nyro-esque readings, go plaintive a la Karen Carpenter, or sharpen into Anglophilic meringue peaks a la early Parliament protégé Ruth Copeland, or Buffy Sainte-Marie.

How’s the music? Very respectable, with strong showings throughout over Eastern-flecked tracks (check the galvanizing tablas on “Fallen Angel”), haunting balladry (“White Linen,” comparable to the Poppy Family) and baroque R&B (the gorgeous “Song to the Magic Frog”). Nowhere does this group’s strengths make themselves more prevalent than on “Lament of the Astro Cowboy,” a sprawling, eight-minute opus lost in a tonk of bass groove, ripping violin screech and explosive guitar distortion. As this track rolls out, it becomes painfully obvious that Saturn Rings is a very clued-in flipside to Sainte-Marie circa Illuminations, not as possessed and blessed with more robust songcraft and an offhanded mastery of the studio environment, lysergically kissed and eternally blissed out.

01. Would You Like to Go :33
02. Blind as You Are 2:54
03. Song to a Magic Frog 3:43
04. Fallen Angel 3:32
05. Spinning, Spinning, Spinning 3:24
06. Know Yourself 4:39
07. Musty Dusty 5:08
08. Lament of the Astro Cowboy 8:09
09. White Linen 2:31
10. Misty 3:51
11. Believe You 3:59