The Incredible String Band
Album: I looked Up
Label: BGO
Tracks: 6
Website: http://www.bgo-records.com

Following its systematic reissue of the band's late-period (Island label) releases, BGO now turns its attention to the Elektra years, but proceeding in roughly reverse chronological order. I Looked Up, released in the spring of 1970, was the band's penultimate recording for that imprint, and shows the central (quintessential) four-piece ISB lineup (Mike Heron and Robin Williamson, with Rose Simpson and Licorice McKechnie) in what might be termed a post-transitional phase (having "changed horses" the previous year) and heavily under the influence of scientology.

The album was, it transpires, recorded in a bit of a rush, while the band's energies were being concentrated elsewhere (on busily rehearsing their ambitious magnum-opus stage extravaganza U). Its comparatively meagre tally of six songs does, however, straddle virtually the whole artistic and stylistic gamut of their output of the time, while it could easily have brought in double that number of songs from their extensive live repertoire of the period, some of which were destined to remain commercially unrecorded. It's a strange set, and strangely uneven (even by the standards of ISB strangeness), for all that it contains some of the band's most eminently accessible music alongside some of their most eminently intractable music! An album of extremes, then - from the trad-arr folky jollity of Black Jack Davy with its glorious twin-fiddling, through the unsure baroque-pop cadences of The Letter, to two of Mike's finest compositions: the lovely ode-cum-chanson-d'amour Fair As You and the enigmatic "gosh & golly" celebration of being that is This Moment. Robin's allocation comprises just two compositions, both lengthy (a little over ten minutes apiece), and these couldn't be more contrasted - on one hand, the memorable, intensely heavy-duty gothic-trad of Pictures In A Mirror with its overpowering, doomy eastern-European overtones, and on the other hand the obstinately unmemorable, equally heavy-duty-in-its-own-way self-help man-psychology of When You Find Out Who You Are.

Nonetheless, the album's still worth having, for it forms a reasonably accessible stopgap between the excesses of 1969's Changing Horses and the excesses of the forthcoming song-dance-mime fable U. It can be seen as suitably representative of the band's wavering direction and its attempts to be all things at once and musically all-embracing, while the "impish charm and tongue-in-cheek fairy mythology" aspect of the band's act was accentuated in Janet Shankman's faux-naïf cover art. This is reproduced on the new BGO reissue, which sports a booklet essay by John Tobler that's more of a career précis and overview than a specific assessment of I Looked Up; for anything approaching the latter, you need to seek out the 2002 Warner/Elektra reissue and Mike Heron's canny anecdotal reappraisal therein. This latest remastering sounds just fine, albeit only a marginal discernible improvement in clarity over the aforementioned Warner/Elektra version.

David Kidman