Sometimes a Great Notion

“…He had a white-labelled 45 rpm test pressing on the turntable and he put it into play. The room was filled with this amazing sound. I had no idea what it was, but it was the most incredible thing I’d ever heard. I slowly and numbly felt my way through the aural maze and discerned what I thought were two black guys singing a very sad, tortured, oh so laboured and stated regret about things ‘she’ didn’t do anymore when they kissed, of eyes no longer closing when they called her name… or was it kissed her lips?
“Underneath lay a bed of sustained everything — drones of echo’d majestic hurt that lasted forever, the only movement provided by a La Bamba-thick bass on quinalbarbitone. Come the chorus, the track, as one, started a stop-start tymphflayed, ricochet’d beat as voices, angels and strings strained in Wagnerian, classical ache, followed by another verse of high pain. On the altar of middle eight the rhythm got down on its knees, pulling the symphonic sustain along to the next corner — and just ‘babys’ and ‘please.’ The two voices’ gospel shrieks and wails were then propelled by a bass-end Latin suggestion of rhythm and hope through the last heaven’s gate of the final, telling chorus.
“That last chorus was as if Jesus had risen, as if Moses had come down with the Ten Commandments of sound…. There was so much sound that I wouldn’t not have been surprised if I’d just heard three different recordings playing different parts of the whole. The audio fidelity was that awe-inspiring…” — Andrew Loog Oldham in 2STONED (Vintage 2003), p. 76-77.