Michael Head & The Strands - The Magical World Of The Strands

8.0 - England - 1997

As a younger lad, I saw this album mentioned in Select magazine back in the late 90s; I recall it was listed in their top albums of 1997 (a vintage year that saw excellent releases by Cornershop, Spiritualized, and some obscure Oxford combo called the Radio Heads). In those heady, pre-Napster days, obtaining records from England was a difficult affair for a teenager in Ottawa, Canada. Finding a Cornershop or Dodgy record was an occasion for joy, but to get a Super Furries record meant having to go to Toronto or, god forbid, navigating the choppy waters of pre-Amazon mail ordering. As for this somewhat obscurer slice of British folk rock, forget it. Head's follow-up, recorded under the band name Shack, was a bit easier to find, but this album never seemed to be readily available on this side of the Atlantic. A shame, as from what I'd read, The Magical World Of The Strands seemed right up the alley of late 90s me, just getting into the Velvet Underground, Love, and the expansive discography of Bob Dylan. 

Hearing it now (finally), it turns out I was right. Truly an underrated album, The Strands is a delightful British take on late 60s jangly folk rock. The songs have a timeless, almost mediaeval feel to them, like a much hipper, post-punk John Barleycorn. "Queen Matilda" starts things off wonderfully with some lilting finger-picking and echoey lead runs intertwined around a sailing tale (a most befitting subject matter for the Liverpool based Head, a theme to which he would return on Shack's H.M.S. Fable). Elsewhere, "It's Harvest Time" sounds like something that could have been sung in English villages for centuries. But it's not all "Scarborough Fair", throughout the gentle acoustic guitars, the ghost of 'lectricity periodically rears its snarling head (viz. the cool schizophrenia of "Glynys and Jaqui" and "And Luna" in which both songs suddenly lurch to life before settling back down into the hazy pastoralism that dominates the record). The influence of Love might be most notable on the album's second track, "Something Like You" in which the jangly guitars are augmented with a seductive string section and a most soulful vocal from Head. A terrific album, and one that should've been a classic. Wish I could've heard it all those years ago, but better late than never.