Love Live Life - Psych Jazz Rock (Japan)

A Japanese psych rock gem that is worth seeking out. The album has A LOT of variation, goes into separate parts of rocking psych, avant-jazz and classical-sounding stuff. Some of it is highly energetic and rocking, while at the same time there are some peaceful orchestrated passages. Very prominent presence of flutes and saxophones. Unique sounding stuff and ahead of its time.

Love Will Make a Better You, the only album credited to Love Live Life + One, is a perfect exemplar of the Japanese psych super-session scene. The most successful album by impresario Ikuzo Orita (responsible for Foodbrain and Shiniki Chen), the disc paired a nimble crew of improv freaks (like guitarist Kimio Mizutani) with mainstream pop star Akira Fuse and his band, along with a songbook by saxophonist Kei Ichihara. The resultant album is rich in Sly Stone-influenced funk and wild guitar solos from Mizutani and Takao Naoi. Though Fuse wasn't the only mainstream star to dabble in the avant-garde -- normally he covered the Carpenters and other lite American fare -- his star presence insured that the album never flew too far into self-indulgence. The disc's second side, in fact, contains four of the more superbly arranged tunes in the Japanese psych canon, containing sweet choruses, pumping post-McCartney bass, shredding guitar, and exhilarating breaks (especially the horns on the disc-closing "Facts About It All"). In under four and a half minutes, the album's title track is simultaneously hook-filled and sonically overwhelming, both freewheeling and utterly controlled. The nine-minute "Shadows of the Mind" is an ESL mini-epic rendered as orchestral free jazz that bursts into machine gun John Barry-isms. Even Mizutani and Naoi's guitar-offs are fit perfectly into the bigger tapestry (which, in turn, dissolves into strings before phase-shifting back into the verse). The focus is especially present on the disc's requisite 17-minute jam, the side one-filling "The Question Mark," which builds patiently from fuzz miasma to a shrieking pulse without ever showing its hand.

Love Will Make A Better You (1971)

Thanks Magal