Pearls Before Swine: The Complete ESP-Disk Recordings : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

The first two LPs by acid-folk minstrels Pearls Before Swine, One Nation Underground (1967) and Balaklava(1968), are definitively united on a single CD, a combined high of psychedelic delicacy and deceptive urgency. In songs such as "Another Time" and "Translucent Carriages," leader Tom Rapp wrote of pure love and victory over fear in the language and color of dreams, laced with the antique airs of swinehorn and harpsichord -- then sang of that devotion and despair in a wounded, yearning whisper, haunting the music like a battlefield ghost. Rapp made gently moving records into the Seventies, but these are his masterpieces. The only bummer here: scanty liner notes, lacking the detailed historical insight these harrowing beauties deserve.