Neverneverland

Imagine picking up this album sound unheard, regarding the band’s name and the album title and the cheery looking high-fantasy cover art with hippie-skeptical bemusement, queueing up the opening track — and then getting absolutely bludgeoned by “Do It,” a classic of manic monomaniacal proto-punk so driven by hollering fast-guitar intensity that Rollins Band could cover it over two decades later with minimal tweaking. But that’s the Pink Fairies for you: a bunch of psychedelic miscreants far more simpatico with Hawkwind’s warp-speed-ahead intensity than the lingering remnants of gentle flowers-and-granola ’60s idealism. Their debut LP Never Never Land (often stylized without spaces because who has the time?) thrives off that same high-energy level its opening cut promises, rowdy enough to mollify disillusioned rockers waiting for punk to happen but still well in tune with the festival-rock sprawl that made them must-hear live-jam purveyors in the early ’70s. Call it “low art rock” if you want, but even their trippy-dippiest cuts (the pre-Dark Side Floydisms of “Heavenly Man”; the deconstructed military-as-lowdown-woman-or-vice-versa bluesery of “War Girl”; the title track’s “silk and leather” solidarity) have enough gnarly distortion and nerve-rattling momentum underlying their agreeably noodly wanderings to win over rock fans who’ve never stepped foot in a head shop. Hell, you could even convince them that “Teenage Rebel” is a long-lost Back in the USA-era MC5 cover — though the drug-bust apocalypse of the nearly eleven-minute “Uncle Harry’s Last Freakout” that follows it is even more in that anarchic Kick Out the Jams spirit. Prog? Psych? Stoner rock? Sort all that business out some other time; this is too good a record to enforce subcultural borders around.