About Time

There’s a lot that’s remarkable about this album. For one thing, it’s one of the very best of any hippie generation musicians’ attempts to come to terms with punk and all that followed. For another, when he parachuted into New York following the burn out of the various manifestations of Gong, Daevid Allen managed to land himself with a core backing band of Bill Laswell and a then still teenaged Fred Maher and Cliff Cultreri, i.e. the group which would shortly become Material. The resulting songs are clearly a true meeting of minds in the space where jazz fusion meets no wave rawness and foolishness and seriousness become inseparable. Allen’s mischievous wizard vocal is, as ever, an acquired taste but the grooves here are up there with the best of the best punk-funk from their contemporaries on Ze Records and similar.