We're up to twenty! Time for an old-school All Pearls, No Swine...

All Pearls, No Swine celebrates its 20th edition! Woohoo! A bit more than a year and the series that started it all is still going strong...after some adventures in the 2000s and the 80s now back in the decade that also started it all. Back to the 70s again, folks, with the usual mix of folk, country rock, rock'n'roll, some soul rock and a healthy dose of psychedelia for dessert. 

As per usual I tried to find a good balance between better known acts with lesser known songs and unknown acts with...uh...even lesser known songs. For the bigger names here, we got Little Feat with a Bill Payne written-and-sung outtake from the sessions for the first album. The Feat feast continues unabated! The Chamber Brothers' beautiful version of "The Weight" brings the soul, while Geronimo Black were a slightly proggish rock band built around former members of The Mothers of Invention, kicking things off here with the driving "Low Ridin' Man". 

The Flying Circus were Australian bubble gum chartbusters come country rockers who really wanted to be the Sweetheart-era Byrds and later emigrated to Canada and went for a harder-edged rock sound. Their "It's So Hard" is still firmly in their harmony-based country rock phase. Nechako, as almost expected by their name, are another country rock outfit.

Until relistening to this I had forgotten how country Lew London's "Rodeo Rider" with its singing pedal steel really is, or how Larry Jon Wilson's "Ohoopee River Bottomland" with its details of local country life seems to be a distant cousin to Bobbie Gentry and her storytelling style. Charlie Webster's "No Horse Town" is an intriguing odd little number, first carried by swirling guitars, before turning into a piano-based tune, while Keith Dear is providing some dreamy folk rock slightly reminiscent of Donovan and Gritz bring the grits with their swampy rock recalling "Bayou Country".  

And then I decided to let this volume of APNS run out with a triple whopper of psych rock. First there's Blackfeather, who for one album were a psych-prog-hard rock troupe before personnel changes saw them morph into a barrelhouse piano-wielding fifties revival act. Then we have psych folk protest singer Mike Glick remind people that "You Can Not Stop History" and finally Bruce Palmer takes us home with "The Calm Before The Storm". 

Everything old is everything new with these All Pearls, No Swine. Enjoy...and to the next twenty! Excelsior!