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The Incredible String Band - The Big Huge (1968)

Track listing:
  1. Maya 9:32
  2. Greatest Friend 3:39
  3. The Son of Noah's Brother 0:22
  4. Lordly Nightshade 5:14
  5. The Mountain of God 1:52
  6. Cousin Caterpillar 5:23
  7. The Iron Stone 6:35
  8. Douglas Traherne Harding 6:24
  9. The Circle Is Unbroken 4:42

Notes

Japan 24-Bit Remaster

Orignally issued as a double LP set in 1968 in the U.K, Wee Tam and the Big Huge was split into two LP's for the U.S. market in 1969 to no avail; they didn't sell. Hannibal remastered them for CD in 1994 and reissued them as a double CD. Collector's Choice has brought them back into print and has added absolutely nothing to the package, except for making the original lyrics so small that even a magnifying glass may not help.

The music on these two albums is ultimately kinder than the Incredible String Band's earlier albums, The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter and The 5000 Spirits or the Layers of the Onion. While the band didn't give up their use of many Eastern string and reed instruments, they did employ somewhat more conventional Western folk song structures, making the ease-of-listening factor much higher. Robin Williamson and Mike Heron, who founded the band with Rose Simpson and Licorice McKechie, began to move toward the forefront of the collective here, asserting their often-complementary but sometimes clashing styles — not to mention vocals — over the gorgeous voices of the two women (typical).

The songs on the first half of the set, the Wee Tam half, are somewhat stronger, but those on the latter half possess a certain spaciness and childishness that is charmingly anarchic in spirit — and execution. What sets this record apart from the first two is that here the Incredible String Band accepted their mantle as a band, that they could let the excess fall by the wayside and actually write somewhat conventional songs without giving up either their love for arcane music, quirky (at best) humor, or for the possibilities of acid culture to inform any kind of artistic venture.

Wee Tam and the Big Huge is not the innocent venture of a host of hippies in love with making weird but wonderful music from the wreckage of the distant past. Here, the mysticism of the present era (the 1960s) is fused together with progressive as well as ancient folk music styles to produce conceptually progressive (art)work from the anarchy. Wee Tam and the Big Huge is the sound of a band coming into its own, for better and worse.