Great Time — Great Album
The vast, vast majority of my music is not only from the often distant past. After my first few years of record collecting, in junior high and high school, I rarely focused on new releases. My interest in when a record “drops” is usually at zero, and there are very few whose new releases get me excited. But I do listen to some contemporary music, and in this case, I’d say much more than contemporary — more like groundbreaking.
Great Time is a Philly area band, and full disclosure: we know them. They are doing fascinating things with electronics, programmed beats, live instruments, the flute . . . I mean, everything. Their performances are amazing. They’ve gotten a lot of attention locally and have a really strong fan base, and were doing successful tours back in the before times. I’m completely challenged to describe the music – it defies description by my old-fashioned simple pop music mind, but if you can imagine a band using live instruments and electronics together in an ever-shifting mix to create ethereal psychedelic soul in a hip hop vein, and making it exciting to watch – well, that’s getting close. I can’t do them justice, so I’ll point you to one of their most popular songs and let you hear for yourself:
So, I already had their album on CD, but they undertook a vinyl project (a daunting prospect for an independent group), and for the sake of sound quality chose to put the entire album out at 45 RPM. The resulting sound is absolutely incredible. This came out in 2020 . . . though of course we had to wait until the lockdown was over and Forever Changes was back in order to get it. It was worth the wait.
Go to their website for more!
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