- Label: 'Think Like A Key Music'
- Genre: 'Seventies'
- Release Date: '25.7.25.'- Catalogue No: 'TLAK1213'
Our Rating:
This is the first ever Cd re-issue of Anomaly the legendary album by Chicago based oddballs McLuhan, originally released on Brunswick Records in 1972, This album is quite astonishingly mad in all the best ways, They must have ingested boatloads of weird drugs, to create this album inspired by Marshall McLuhan. The album was recorded in Brunswick Studios in Chicago, the band were Neal Rosner, Dennis "Stoney" Phillips, Tom Tojza, John Mahoney and Michael Linn. I'd like to read an in depth look at this album by a psychologist. The reformed band are playing at the equally legendary Martyrs in Chicago on August 30th.
The album opens with Monster Bride that sounds like it could be from a soundtrack, this has a library music feel to the way it gently opens on a bucolic scene, before magically transforming into something like a cross between Jean Jacques Perrey, Bo Hansson and a cartoon soundtrack with some odd touches including the Thames TV 1970's ident music and some slightly off, jazz interludes all before the vocals come in like they are trying to be the Incredible String Band with a slow narration and soft passage that builds with salvoes of trumpets and some very 1970's narration of the large chested bride with a scenario that would have worked in The Rocky Horror Picture show, before an Italian porn soundtrack outro this is one hell of an opening 10 minutes.
Spiders (In Neal's Basement) has a central story style vocals, with trumpets and organ backing it, they imagine electronic images long before they became commonplace, it gets funkier with some intricate guitar working around all the percussion effects they can come up with, the spiders then crawl across the basement in a Minnie The Moocher style, they are in thrall to very different Spiders to the ones David Bowie was on about in 1972. The narrator comes back to give a speech that touches on Vietnam and other mysteries of the era, while the brass section leads us on a merry chase.
Witches Theme And Dance is back in the Bo Hansson meets Incredible String Band territory, cool harmony vocals and odd synth interjections, some woodwind and the lyrics really need a good listen for all the stuff they cram in, this goes in episodes of intensity and just funky soundtrack sounds, they tell us that if you understand this song you might just sing along, maybe.
The album closes with A Brief Message From You Local Media (The Garden/The Assembly Line/Electric Man/Question) that's not so brief at ten minutes long, this has a bucolic Soft Machine feel with a slow narration that talks about Henry Ford's Assembly line before it goes flute funk with jazzy interludes with a truly mad xylophone solo that reintroduces the brass section that helps to ask that vital final question with a very watch with mother outro.
Find out more at https://www.thinklikeakey.com/release/511917-mcluhan-anomaly-2025-remaster https://www.facebook.com/mcluhanband https://mcluhan.bandcamp.com/album/anomaly https://mcluhan.band/
