Sound of Sunforest

Sometimes it seems like there must have been something in the water (or the air) in England during 1969 that brought all of these folk musicians to the fore in rock music — the two acoustic musicians from Methuselah break away to form the Amazing Blondel; Prelude starts their career; Mary Hopkin gives Apple Records its biggest non-Beatles hit (i.e., "Those Were the Days"); and, getting back to the subject at hand, Sunforest, a previously unknown folk-based trio (Terry Tucker, Erika Eigen, Freya Hough) gets signed to Decca Records and cuts this album for the company's Nova imprint. And this is one strange album, to be sure, with wildly varying sounds and styles across its 15 tracks, from the lush harmony singing on "Be Like Me" to the lapses into novelty and children's songs on "Lady Next Door" and "Peppermint Store." When Sound of Sunforest is folky, it's mostly in a distinctly pop vein, but there's also a defiantly progressive current running through this entire album, as well — the winds and reeds on the opening "Overture to the Sun" declare that this is no folk revival record, and the keyboard cadenza on "Be Like Me" carries the main body of the album into realms of classical-style exploration that most folk albums avoided. A small orchestra plays the opening bars of "And I Was Blue" behind the ethereal harmonies of the trio, before the core rock trio (Herbie Flowers, Big Jim Sullivan, et al.) takes over with a leaner folk-rock sound. And the trio lets their hair down for some plain lighthearted fun on "Lighthouse Keeper," a folk-cum-music hall number complete with kazoo that wouldn't have been out of place in the repertory of Spanky & Our Gang. Strangest of all in "Magician in the Mountain," an odd, jazz-tinged piece that would be the highlight of the record — where Herbie Flowers and company get into a decided funk groove — if it were only representative of the record. Instead, it isn't like anything else here, which doesn't detract from its value but limits one's ability to recommend the album, based on its presence. Needless to say, an album with so many diverse sounds wasn't going to get anywhere in 1969 without a hit single to draw people in, and Sound of Sunforest didn't have that. But it is a beautiful and entertaining artifact of its period as a production tour de force by the trio and producer Vic Smith (aka Vic Coppersmith-Heaven) — and it might be the most daring psychedelic-cum-progressive record to show up on Decca this side of the Moody Blues' Days of Future Passed (another album that was outside of any stylistic category at the time of its release) Ah, those were, indeed, the days....