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| Pitchfork |
 When it comes to cratedigging labels dedicated to documenting niche scenes, there are two extremes you often wind up dealing with. On the one hand, there's the gatekeepers-- garage-punk supremacists, Northern Soul zealots-- that see their efforts as the preservation of a great subgenre. They're crazy and you don't want to strike up conversations with them at record fairs, but their fundamentalist attitude at least tends to result in their compilations being pretty consistent. And at the other end, there's the general-interest guys, the ones who started as sample hunters and wound up getting drawn into their source material. At best, they build unexpected and illuminating connections between bands and scenes that never knew of each other's existence; at worst, they sometimes mistake "I found it first" for "this should be heard immediately."Now-Again falls in that second, egalitarian category, and Forge Your Own Chains represents the best and worst of that impulse. To the credit of curator Egon, his liner notes state that the purpose of this collection isn't to show off a bunch of rare collector-baiting nuggets but to find common threads between an international assemblage of acid-rock oddities. And the subtitle-- Heavy Psychedelic Ballads and Dirges-- points to an intriguing vein of music; more intriguing yet is the aim of collecting variations of it from five different continents. But when you're working with psychedelic rock, one of the most uneven genres when it comes to old, small-press, and private-press releases, even the best intentions can result in a bit of a mess. The good news with Forge Your Own Chains is that listening to it all the way through will leave you with both positive first and last impressions. Bookending the comp with its two most sprawling and intense tracks is a canny move, and what Top Drawer's mournful, wailing-guitar-in-a-cathedral epic "Song of a Sinner" and the open-throttle squall of Baby Grandmothers' "Somebody's Calling My Name" share is a sense of slowly-building anxiety, which they use to different ends. But a sizeable chunk of the stuff between these two tracks lacks a lot of their focused intensity, and there's moments where a conceptually promising piece of music is let down by an amateurism that can't quite match the ambition....full text |
| Prefixmag |
| Compilations collecting genre obscurities have become ubiquitous in the decade since the re-release of Nuggets by Rhino in 1998. From Soul Jazz Records’ expert retrospectives to idiosyncratic reissue labels like Subliminal Sounds, the average trip to the (proverbial?) record store promises not only the latest contemporary releases, but also a definitive sampling of once-obscure genres like Italo Disco and African Highlife. Stones Throw imprint Now-Again has assembled Forge Your Own Chains with this market saturation in mind. The 16-track survey of “Heavy Psychedelic Ballads and Dirges” recorded between 1968 and 1974 forgoes loyalty to a specific country or style of music, highlighting tracks from a global cross-section of musicians and a diversity of genres. Cut by Top Drawer, an obscure Kentucky outfit that released its sole album in 1969, the nine-minute opener “Song of a Sinner” is a perfect long-form psychedelic statement with a plaintive vocal and memorable guitar work that compares favorably with contemporaneous psych-rock classics like the 13th Floor Elevators’ “Pictures (Leave Your Body Behind).” “How Great Thou Art” follows, an arresting gospel/funk track by Cleveland’s the Sensational Saints. This study in contrasts between the two tracks is typical of the album’s sequencing. In the liner notes, producer/compiler Egon explains that none of the tracks were selected because of their rarity, only for their appropriateness in the context of the compilation....full text |
| Examiner |
| The first thing you need to know about this compilation is where it came from. Now-Again Records was created in 2001 as a progressive arm of Los Angeles indie hip-hop label Stones Throw, and focuses both on exposing fresh new talent and resurrecting raw, heavy funk music from the archives of the ‘60s and ‘70s. And they do it really, really well. The sub-title on Forge Your Own Chains clues you in to the music you’ll find inside, but like any good release that’s trying to hip you to new flavors, the disc comes with a fat little booklet with background on each band and song featured on the collection. The sounds and textures on Forge Your Own Chains aren’t drawn from the same well as the dap flavor you hear on record by Sharon Jones or Candi Staton. This album is full of eerie, hard-panned mixes littered with finger cymbals, pipe organs, and more ‘verb than the Oxford English Dictionary. “Songs of a Sinner’ by Top Drawer sets the tone with a lazy, rambling confessional that’ll have you reaching for the bourbon before noon, while Ofege’s “It’s Not Easy” sounds like the Marshall Tucker Band’s “Can’t You See” if Doug Gray was a Columbian woman high on acid and not drunk on Jack. These are seriously deep cuts, and they won’t appeal to everyone, but adventurous listeners who drink in all 15 tracks will really get a taste for the era that Now-Again is trying to portray. Every time capsule is a history lesson, but not every history lesson is worth hearing. This one is....full text |
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