Reviews
Baby Grandmothers
Baby Grandmothers
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Add to del.ico.us.Review Date: 2007-04-28
I’ve become accustomed to a certain sound making its way to my ears from Sweden -- and no, this isn’t going to be another love letter to the indie-pop stylings of those wonderful lads and lasses from the laissez-faire country that we at TWM love so much. Well, not in that same way we’ve done it before. That is because Baby Grandmothers is a brand new bag – or perhaps better put, a brand new refurbished old bag that fell into my lap a few weeks back.
Baby Grandmothers didn’t stick around long, having a short career in the mid-to-late sixties in which they only ever really released one single and debatably were responsible for the first ever hard-rock recording in Sweden. This slice of rock history was unbeknownst to me until the wonderful people at Subliminal Records decided to give new life to the Baby Grandmothers legacy, packaging a CD featuring seven tracks of their finest material – the first two being the songs from the aforementioned single, and the rest tremendous live recordings.
Listening to the Baby Grandmothers, it’s hard for me to even fathom them as an obscure psychedelic band. Just piecing together the timelines of their career and how unique this sound would have been at the time, I can’t imagine them not being a major influence on many of the bands who perform this style of music today. The reality is they would have been influenced by them, but probably never had a chance. That’s bad ass. I guess you could call them one of the most influential bands of the sixties who never had the notoriety to ever actually influence.
In a modern context, think of the most recent awesome, completely unknown opening band at a concert where you had come to see the headliner, then imagine that forty years later, this band had their brief catalogue re-released and you were at that show. That would be pretty damn cool. I’m sure that is the case for the many fans who saw Baby Grandmothers shred the stage opening for one Jimi Hendrix.
But this isn’t a history lesson, this is about the music. Tell me how satisfying an amazing dinner presentation is if the food sucks. Thankfully, Baby Grandmothers taste delicious. You might expect the two songs from the single to be worthwhile and the remainder to be filler, but it almost works in reverse. “Somebody Keeps Calling My Name” is an alright song with relatively annoying vocals, and “Being is More Than Life” shows promise yet still sounds somewhat restrained.
Once free of the shackles of the single and in their element playing live, Baby Grandmothers unleash a massive sixteen-plus-minute prog/psych rock masterpiece in “Bergakungen.” This is the type of performance you expect from a band that has become so established that they have the balls to just unleash a song of this magnitude on you in the middle of a show, but it works in large part due to the magic that is Kenny Hakannson’s never-ending bag of guitar tricks.
Then they tone the ambition down a bit, right? Not even close, instead tilting the boldness meter even just a little bit further with “Being is more than Life”, which runs for a measly nineteen minutes. Listening to this now, it’s no surprise to envision Baby Grandmothers being a perfect choice to open for Hendrix. You’ll have to hear it to believe it, but Hakannson’s guitar is good enough that you’d remember it and probably talk about it even after having seen Hendrix headline. The one drawback of this recording is that the intensity the band plays with makes you want to turn up your speakers, but the louder you go the weaker the recording quality gets.
Considering how rough these recording must have been when Subliminal started out working with them, that they sound as clean as they do is an. There’s a part of me that wonders whether any of this would really even sound that authentic if it had the pristine studio treatment we are so used to in 2007. I’d guess probably not.
Baby Grandmothers were a force not to be reckoned with that never had a chance to do much reckoning of its own. Still, when a band only ever releases one single and still has the notoriety to resurface forty years later, they must have been doing something right. Find out for yourself.
Score: 7.4
- Dan