Spirit - The Best Of Spirit FLAC

Spirt was a mystical cultish band, able to weave insightful lyrics with visionary music, leaving bassist Mark Andes to say, “Our reputation as an idiosyncratic psychedelic jazz group meant that we were far more influential than we were commercially successful.”

Beginning with Spirit’s 1968 self-titled debut, the band always been left of center, jagged and emancipated on the track “Fresh Garbage,” and so whispering soulful on “Topanga Windows,” which somehow was cut from this collection at the last moment, though why is anyone’s guess, with a tracking time of merely thirty-seven minutes, there was more than enough room for that and a number of other songs. The Family That Plays Together is finely represented, as is the album Clear, a record that was nearly cobbled together from ideas derived for the film soundtrack ‘Model Shop,’ an album that came off patchy and rushed, though the single “Dark Eyed Woman” is pure rock magic, where along with Twelve Dreams Of Dr. Sardonicus, the remaining tracks are drawn.

Disregarding Spirit’s first album, for all intentions, Spirit was very much a singles band, with the numbers found on this collection being highly prized staples of late night progressive radio stations across the world. It’s always struck me as sad that Spirit never found a path that would lead them back to the highflying majestic presentations delivered on the Spirit album. With the passage of time, those reasons have become evidently clear, and it was those reasons that would cause Spirit to continually lace their albums with but one or two, sometimes three, great unforgettable numbers that will stand at the door for anyone seeking to understand the nature and being of the psychedelic 60’s, with music that was ripe both for acid hazed meanderings and was sonically able to lift the roof off of any venue they played.

I’ve been spinning this record since it was first release in 1973, where I was instantly struck with the feeling that absolutely no effort was put into the tracking sequence of this album. All of the material found here is first rate, Spirit was known for creating a production with songs moved in and out of each other, along with numbers that flowed and flowered in a concerted order to engage and inspire the listener. With the eleven dynamic numbers found here, it would have been rather easy to construct a more cohesive listen, so cohesive that listeners might just be fooled into thinking that they were being handed a formal album, where one song did lead into another, where an atmosphere was actually created. In 1974 I did just that, I rearranged all of these tracks using a cassette player, creating a more intoxicating mix that I’ve since reworked onto a CD-R. Nevertheless, this is hands down a super collection of music from a now legendary band, a band that caused the world to sit up and take notice.

Review by Jenell Kesler