Garage Beat '66, Volume 4: I'm in Need! (jolly great)

ALBUM INFO

Sundazed picks up its Garage Beat '66 series where it left off, with the fourth volume, subtitled I'm in Need!, following the same pattern as the first three, serving up 20 garage rock sides from the latter half of the '60s (1966 is ground zero for this comp, but it features tracks recorded between 1965 and 1970). While this series does have something to offer serious collectors — primarily excellent sound quality and a handful of previously unreleased tracks — it isn't intended for garage fanatics: it's designed as the next step for listeners who love Nuggets but don't have the time, inclination, or patience to sort through the various Pebbles and Rubble series. It's also for listeners who have a fairly strict definition of garage, preferring American bands inspired by the Rolling Stones and Yardbirds bashing out blues-influenced primitive rockers, not the psychedelia that runs rampant through Nuggets, because there's precious little of that to be found here. Which isn't to say that Garage Beat is monotonous (well, no more than any other garage rock comp, but anybody interested in this music knows that going into the disc). There's a good variety of sounds and attitudes on I'm in Need!, from the snide, harmonica-fueled opener of the Haunted's "1-2-5" and Rob Kirk & the Word's minor-key, trippy "Girl Talk" to Nobody's Children's fuzzy, sneering "Good Times" and the Torquays' tense, Yardbirds-styled "Harmonica Man (From London Town)." There are three previously unissued cuts here, all noteworthy: the Counts IV's dense, wordy "Discussion of the Unorthodox Council," the Groupies' version of Willie Dixon's "Down in the Bottom," which is a rowdy barnstormer, and the Rahgoos' "Do the Rahgoo," an exhilarating manic two-minute blast of chaos. While there are no big hits here and a couple of cuts don't rise above the appealingly generic, this is a tight, compulsively listenable collection of some of the best second-tier garage rock singles. Much of this can be found elsewhere or is well known to hardened collectors, but for those listeners who don't want to amass a large collection of garage comps, this volume of Garage Beat, like the others, is an excellent distillation of some of the best lesser-known sides of the genre.

GARAGE soul.

LINK: DONT LOSE YOUR MIND ! ! ! (WITH THIS ALBUM)