Half Human / Half Live

It’s not simply that Simply Saucer’s mid-‘70s demos were discovered and released more than a decade later that made the group an instant cult favorite among music obscurists. The Canadian band’s knack for successfully blending avant-garage rock with spaced-out proto-prog and British-flavored psychedelia is what made Simply Saucer totally peerless. Fast-forward to 2008, and a reformed Simply Saucer finally delivers its first proper studio album. Aside from lead guitarist/singer Edgar Breau’s subtly aged voice, Half Human/Half Live plays with the same mysterious alchemy and fruitful risk-taking that made the recordings on Cyborgs Revisited so alluring. The hard-driving space rocker “Exit Plexit” opens with noticeably better fidelity, but the vintage tones suggest that Breau and company never sold the instruments played on Cyborgs Revisited. “Almost Ready Betty” imports more overt garage-rock influences from the mid-'60s before “Dandelion Kingdom” downshifts to play like the kind of psychedelic folk normally associated with the bygone recordings of Donovan, albeit with the lyrical surrealism of a Syd Barrett tune.