POEM BY GEORGE HALL
While not giving the album a glowing review, Richie Unterberger says in Allmusic of the Search Party’s Montgomery Chapel album (the original release, that is): “There were many psychedelic albums like this issued in small press runs in the late ’60s: folky, bittersweet melodies that tilted toward the downright sad and melancholy; high strident female vocals sharing duties with less memorable, more normal-sounding male singing; a studied over-seriousness to the vocal delivery; a naïve, questing-for-the-meaning-of-life tone to the compositions; and organ residing in a halfway house between the LSD trip and the mortuary. Even if you take it as a given that most of these albums have a dated pretentiousness that many would poke fun at, however, this is certainly one of the better such efforts in this mini-genre, and possessed of some real musical appeal in spite of its considerable flaws. Most of the arrangements have an understated, effective (if somewhat creepy) eeriness. Songs like ‘Speak to Me’, ‘Renee Child’, ‘Poem By George Hall’, and ‘The Decidedly Short Epic of Mr. Alvira’ are good time-capsule mood pieces in their evocative otherworldliness, at times sounding a little like a psychedelic seance.”
(September 2014)
