The band USofA are kind of like the moon landing – a leap in progress that’s not been bettered

The sixties was a time when popular music made quantum leaps from bubble gum pop to high art and experimentation. Sergeant Pepper gets rightly credited with putting popular music into space with its huge leap in redefining the role of the studio. But the credit for the musical moon landing goes to the far lesser known album The United States of America by the band of the same name.
Listening to the USofA you have to pinch yourself to remember it’s from the sixties and not the eighties or nineties. Forget all the stuff about Kraftwerk and Gary Numan pioneering synths – USofA were there first. They also spearheaded the idea that popular music could be a high art form that can be both intriguing and enlightening. Something the likes of the wonderful Yes and King Crimson took further, but only after the USofA.
Anyway, judge for yourself….

'The Cake' overlooked at the time - celebrated in the age of youtube

One of the great things about youtube is that stuff that gets overlooked or forgotten (even in its own time) finds new life and new fans as the curious stumble on old videos.

A fine example is the band ‘The Cake’ – I don’t quite know how I stumbled on this video but there’s something very cool and surprising about it. It begins with one of the girls stumbling and made dizzy by the carousel. She for a short while looks as though she refuses to join in as the others start to sing – though this is how they always performed. As they sing they hap hazardly improvise dances with a demeanour that’s very endearing and so opposite from the more usual slick performers of the time. And like the performance the music is not what you expect, being full of psychedelic strings and an amazing reverberant rhythm. It turns out they themselves were great songwriters and well connected to the emerging British progressive rock movement of the late sixties.

Simon Cowell would have hated them, which is why I and a lot of others on youtube think they're very cool.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cake

More slices of The Cake

This one's kind of funny