Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Groovius Hippius Maximus!!!, 24 Oct 2000
By A Customer
When it comes to groovy hippie music it just doesn't get any better than H.P.Lovecraft. My friends and I have been listening to a copy of their second album for years, and I was very pleased to find this compilation as it turns out their first album is just as good. H.P. Lovecraft defines the groovy hippie sound that other bands have only touched upon. Comparable perhaps to old UFO, or early Jefferson Airplane, H.P. Lovecraft is probably my favorite band that no one has ever heard of.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Buy this CD, 2 May 2003
HP Lovecraft don't seem to have been given the credit they deserve. Yet with so many great bands doing the rounds in the 60's, it's not surprising that a few great ones got left to one side. In the case of Lovecraft, this should be redressed immediately by the purchase of this CD. Not everything's fantastic: there are a few duff tracks that show their age. Consistency of approach is not one of Lovecraft's virtues and the quality can suffer as a result. I could have done without that old warhorse 'Lets Get Together', for example. But the bulk of what's on offer here is first rate. Worth the price of admission for 'I've Been Wrong Before' alone. Buy, slot it into your player, and marvel!
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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Forgotten by most, but an above average psychedelic group, 17 Jun 2003
eI think one of the reasons this CD includes both of the albums from the psychedelic rock group H. P. Lovecraft is that otherwise nobody might ever pick up the group's second album which has its moments but is not as focused as the first effort. The 1967 debut album, however, is pretty good, containing a nice blend of original compositions and covers of songs by Randy Newman ("I've Been Wrong Before") and Fred Neil ("Country Boy and Bleeker Street"). The best song on this collection is "White Ship," written by band member Tony Cavallari. The songs, according to the liner notes, were inspired by horror writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft's "macabre tales and poems of Earth populated by another race." However, the only song explicitly dealing with one of Lovecraft's stories is "At the Mountains of Madness," from the second album. That happens to be my favorite Lovecraft story (it is more of a novella) and the song that got me to listen to this group's albums in the early Seventies in the first place. Actually, the more you look at Lovecraft's music the harder it becomes to pigeonhole them as just a psychedelic group, since there are strong elements of folk and jazz in many of these songs. H. P. Lovecraft was formed by former folk singer George Edwards in Chicago, circa 1967, and the group had a distinctive sound because of the dual leads sung by Edwards and keyboardist Dave Michaels, who was a classically trained singer. Unfortunately, the group's second album was a disappointment, although it had a few decent tracks. I always thought H.P. Lovecraft was superior to anything Vanilla Fudge put out in terms of psychedelic rock music but actually at its best the group's music reminds me more of the Jefferson Airplane than anything else. This reissue CD has both of the group's albums and a couple of bonus tracks, although I was happier to see the group's original artwork survive intact.
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