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| Thephoenix |
 More than three years in the making, the most recent installment of Rhino's legendary archival garage-rock series offers an amazingly comprehensive excavation of an absurdly fertile scene. With 101 songs by 99 different artists (the Byrds and Love get two tracks each), most of them culled from original masters, the set's four discs represent four different facets of this sometimes overshadowed corner of mid-'60s pop.Disc one focuses on the bands who haunted the Sunset Strip: Buffalo Springfield, with their bluegrass-inflected "Go and Say Goodbye"; Captain Beefheart, with his booming call-and-response freak-out "Zig Zag Wanderer"; the Seeds, with their snotty proto-punk "Trip Maker." The second disc ventures further afield into the LA 'burbs, finding the Turtles experimenting with a thrumming, goth-like dirge ("Grim Reaper of Love") and "undisputed kings of Chicano rock" Thee Midniters exhorting one and all to "Jump, Jive & Harmonize."...full text |
| Guardian |
| As yet another way of telling the high 60s story, this is a good one: 101 tracks from Los Angeles during that peak moment between 1965 and 1968, when the city of sun, smog and riot made its move to dominate American pop. Buy it from Buy the CD During those years, Los Angeles developed a creative youth culture - centred around the Sunset Strip - that matched anything in London or San Francisco. This was shut down by the police at the end of 1966 after weeks of teen protest - hence the set's opener, the Standells' deliriously exploitative Riot on Sunset Strip....full text |
| Bbc |
| Lenny Kaye can't have had any idea what he was starting when he compiled his original Nuggets album of psychedelic ‘artyfacts’ back in 1972. We've had two huge Nuggets sets, a Children of Nuggets box of disciples, and a San Francisco-specific collection – all of them treasure chests of proto-punk classics and cult obscurities. Mid-60s Los Angeles being a hotbed of such music, Rhino's Andrew Sandoval now follows up 2007's San Francisco Nuggets with a compendium of LA's various exponents of psych-pop and garage punk. From masthead names like The Byrds and Buffalo Springfield to no-hit wonders like Limey & the Yanks, Where the Action Is! is a one-stop tour of mood-altered SoCal teen rock of the period. Sandoval divides his box into four platters. Disc one (‘On the Strip’) offers the names you'll know in a playlist that's like strolling into Gazzari's with a bell-bottomed babe on your arm. What you notice is how an almost generic style of edgy sub-British Invasion pop all but dissolves the differences between Love, Sonny & Cher, The Association and Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band....full text |
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