Love

Da Capo and Forever Changes can, should, and will get their due as Arthur Lee and Love’s greatest expressions of baroque psychedelic pop, but just about any debut album would feel like a warmup compared to those two. Until then, Love’s 1966 self-titled stood as an unusually potent example of what can happen when an emerging band drifting somewhere between garage-rock heaviness and folky pastoralism are starting to find out what they’re really capable of. It’s fun to hear Arthur Lee in snotty young badass mode, whether he’s building off early promise with nervy rockers like nonconformist anthem “My Flash on You,” incinerating everyone else’s attempts to even approach the spiteful yet heartsick way he claims Bacharach and David’s “My Little Red Book,” or giving the Byrds a run for their money in mid-tempo ballads like “Signed D.C.” and jangle-pop gems like “You’ll Be Following.” Lee’s not alone in showing future promise; Bryan MacLean takes over in spectacularly tweaky and anxious fashion on “Hey Joe” (still an uptempo number pre-Hendrix, and with a monster bassline to boot; Ken Forssi is a beast on this LP) and the resilient fragility of “Softly to Me.” But if this album wasn’t best known as a harbinger of things to come, it’d “merely” be a minor masterpiece of West Coast folk-psych, and that’s damn near good enough.