Only in America, Vol. 2

Various Artists: Jim Fassett, The World (We Wish), Lou Berrington & The African Kamp.
Along the lines of the music explored in RE/SEARCH's two Incredibly Strange Music books and Irwin Chusid's Songs in the Key of Z, this 29-song, 79-minute CD assembles some of the weirdest records of the second half of the 20 century. "Weird" here is not synonymous with novelty. A lot of these were not done with the intention of being strange or funny; they just ended up that way, whether because they're the product of "outsider art" or just because. By definition, this sort of thing is a cult taste, and not easy to listen to in large doses. But if you're going to collect some of this stuff, this is a good deal, not only because of its generous length, but also because hearing about 30 different artists in the genre is far, far easier than hearing one artist for an album at a time. Leaning most heavily on discs from the 1960s (including a few "song-poems," i.e. lyrics mailed in to be set to music by professional hacks), though also including sides of later vintage, there's far too much madness here to encapsulate in one paragraph. There's a song about a stinky poodle; a good-time jazz romp celebrating Chicago policemen's behavior at the 1968 Democratic Convention; weird items condemning drug use (Earl Coleman's "Hippy Heaven" has a backing track clearly based on "Cristo Redentor"); Buddy Max's beyond-bizarre talking-cowboy tune "Cheese Eating Flea Market Cowboy"; the Electric Lollipop's "Lightning Bug," on which a respectable garage-psych track backs a class of young school kids; the Monocles' psychedelic horror show "The Spider and the Fly," which actually appeared on the original Pebbles, Vol. 3 compilation; and the most amateurish garage band version of "Purple Haze" imaginable (by the Lost Dimension). There's even a famous person, of sorts, in Woody Guthrie's daughter, Nora Guthrie, whose 1967 single "Emily's Illness" was a morbid slice of orchestrated baroque pop sung from the perspective of a woman dying from "bad blood." And there's even a female imitation of Napoleon XIV. It's all annotated with wit and scholarship in the accompanying 24-page booklet, with stories that are in some instances more interesting than the records themselves. ~ Richie Unterberger