World War IV

unearths yet another psychedelic oddity from the warped mind of (aka ), this time an entirely unreleased masterwork from his prodigious and endlessly creative 1966-1969 period. is labeled a "Symphonic Poem," and whatever that exactly connotes in pop terms is anyone's guess. It is certainly not a conventional song-based effort but a true epic, one that is segmented into extended classical-like sections with titles such as and One certainty is that the album is wide-lensed, a sweeping and ambitiously panoramic experimental piece of avant-garde psychedelia that shares numerous qualities with the equally idiosyncratic but still commercially minded psyche that had previously created, while transferring those qualities to a much larger, mural-sized canvas. As can be expected, the storyline (if it can be called that) is willfully obscure and far-out even by psychedelia's standards, loosely imagining a fourth world war peopled not by military personnel but rather a host of eccentric characters. While is not exactly designed to be accessible in the manner of a collection of 's pop songs, it sustains both a painterly and literary quality that is every bit as enveloping. In fact, loved the album and nearly released it in 1969. 's uncanny penchant for wordplay is vaguely que, although a more appropriate comparison might be that is a British counterpart of sorts to 's , betraying the same kind of warped worldview shared by . Demented observations and mad, darkly humorous puns often undercut the whimsicality of the piece. imagines a world in which the crucifixion of Christ, Nazi Germany, , Oz, Alice's wonderland, 's circus, mediaevalism, and seem to coexist and intermingle in a freakish alternate universe in the countryside of England. Biblical imagery abounds, as do fairytale characters, gypsies, and armies of children straight from the "outsider" art of . Without immediately dating itself, the album contains embedded commentaries on war, spirituality, political power, and a great number of other subjects that were especially endemic to the era. There must be fragments of 20 or 30 individual songs spliced into the mix -- ranging in style from mindbending psychedelia to Baltic folk melodies -- including perhaps the most beautifully sustained example of backwards phasing (during the dirgelike fifth section, ) in the entire psychedelic canon. The cycle culminates in the stunningly ambitious Prophetic, unpredictable, labyrinthine, and frequently disturbing, is just about as imaginative as pop music gets. It is ultimately impossible to follow the path that is trying to burn through the forest, but it is thrilling even when the listener gets lost along the way. The album, as one lyric during has it, is "deformed so beautifully." Not the first stop for neophytes looking to understand the legacy by any means, may nevertheless be his definitive artistic statement, and the premier slice of "outsider" pop from the period. ~ Stanton Swihart