BABY WOODROSE - Never Coming Back Review by: hogfeldt (StonerRock.com) Label: Bad Afro Records Release Date: OUT NOW!!! 7 Single (45 rpm) Baby Woodrose´s new 7 (on Bad Afro Records) are just as good as (or maybe even better than) the Blows Your Mind! fullength album of last year... The song on the A-side, Never Coming Back, are a psychedelic rocktune of top notch quality, but I guess anyone who have heard the Blows Your Mind! album wasn´t expecting anything less than another psychedelic masterpiece. As soon as I heard the song on the B-side I thought there was something familiar about it... after a while it clicked, it´s the song from Love´s selftitled debut-album from `66. As I don´t have this album in my collection at the moment (but I will buy it... again), I couldn´t do a straight comparison between the two versions... but needless to say it´s a catchy little tune and Baby Woodrose does a cool version of it... Once again it´s the Malleus boys who´s done the sleeve artwork, not as explicit as the Blows Your Mind! artwork... but there´s still something here for the fans of female anatomy (just a little hint of untrimmed bush this time around). If you liked Blows Your Mind! you´re gonna love this 7 incher... if you haven´t heard Baby Woodrose yet, but are a fan of good psychedelia, you´ll get a nice introduction to the band with this release... Songs: A-side: Never Coming Back B-side: My Flash On You

Baby Woodrose Blows Your Mind! CD (2001, Pan Records) reviewed by Brock With the recent, meteoric appearance of Baby Woodrose onto the Danish music scene, Copenhagen now strangely and suddenly finds itself home to the most exciting new European garage act of 2001. The band is currently wowing ´em in Copenhagen-area clubs in their smokin´ live incarnation. But the Baby Woodrose captured on this CD is the solitary work of one "Lorenzo Woodrose" (aka Guf Lorenzen- the drummer from Copenhagen psychedelic cosmonauts On Trial), who composed all of the songs and who plays all of the instruments himself. The result- Blows Your Mind- is a stunning 14-song tapestry of tambourine shake, psychedelic organ swirl, and fuzz guitar-charged bubble-punk. Music dually capable of flashy flights of beautiful, fragile bummerdelica as it is of searing, white-light fuzz rock-out. Rich in its dreamy use of both lead and backing vocals which run a moody range from wounded despair to dazed, innocent wonder to righteously pissed off scorn. The lyrics are appropriately and firmly rooted within the garage rock tradition, while rarely lingering too long in cliché. Basically, this is evil hippie music as it were meant to be played; modern acid-punk in the truest and best sense of both those loaded terms. The Baby Woodrose sound draws from a golden well of lysergic garage rock greatness both past and present. At first listen, the most noticeable and arguably important imprints - both vocally and musically - are those of Texan loco-weed rock´n´roll dementia (The 13th Floor Elevators, The Golden Dawn), paired with the darkly pained introspection of Clackamas, Oregon´s resident fuzz-guru, Fred Cole (The Lollipop Shoppe, The Weeds and Dead Moon), both of which are consistently lurking underneath musical surface of Baby Woodrose. Just as unmistakably evident are traces of a legion of other 1960s long-haired fractured geniuses, including elements of Love, The Kinks, The Music Machine, The Seeds, The Troggs and on to others even more arcane. Being a Scandinavian garage band of our age, The Stooges and The MC5 have aurally had their impact on Baby Woodrose, while more contemporary points of reference include Monster Magnet and -of course- the heady legacy of On Trial itself. Baby Blows Your Mind, the band´s hypnotic signature screamer, is a freak call to arms anthem very much in the crazed Texas punk tradition-savage and unhinged but also infectiously melodic and with an odd prettiness about it. Other personal faves include the 60s sunset-strip farfisa-shake of D´ya Get What Ya Give; the raunchy Seeds meets The Kinks of "Flaminica" and the haunted, Fred Cole-like ballads of Spinning Wheels Of Fire. And Kara Lynn: the first, a nightmarish flashback lament; the other, an impassioned plea to a friend caught in a spiral of self-destruction. Living A Dream - currently, the band´s live set opener- sounds like a yellowed, hallucinogenic postcard once sent by Roky Erickson while on a beach holiday (complete with sampled sea-gull effects!) Then there´s the monolithic Right To Get High- a fuzzy mammoth of a punker backing a tale of mid-tour flake-out that will hit home with anybody ever been stuck in an all-too-small van for weeks on end. While you garage rock scientists out there will undoubtedly have a blast tracing the various strains of parentage in these numbers, the music on Blows Your Mind is about as far from copyist as you can get. Rather, much in the footsteps of their contemporaries in The Soundtrack Of Our Lives, Baby Woodrose prove to be masterful at absorption; at taking only the good pieces and building out from there. Lorenzo Woodrose certainly knows his way around the psyche garage,and sees the possibilities within. Even when getting downright cheeky about it (on the grinding electro-boogie number Noboby Spoil My Fun, there are not only swipes of the title from a Seeds song and an evil riff that sounds as if nicked right out of the trunk of Ron Asheton´s Dodge Charger, but also a direct cop of the things-I-do-you-never-tried lines straight outta The Groupies´ Primitive) the songs have more than enough original character, passion and ideas injected into them to stand solidly on their own. As is the case with the aforementioned TSOOL, Baby Woodrose are unmistakably more on the über-garage side of the fence than the retro-garage side. ´Cos, at the end of the day- no matter what kinda music you play- it really all just comes down to how good your songs are. The original garage bands (and certainly their hit-hungry record labels) constantly had one eye firmly glued on the then very real commercial possibilities of success, of realising the dream of becoming the next Beatles/ Rolling Stonesif only on a local level in their corner of the globe for a brief period of time. Rock WAS king then, more musicians could make a career out of it and so the competition was fierce and the stakes were upped. This is a fact that Blows Your Mind is clearly hip to. Caught In A Whirl is a perfect case-in-point: a beautiful, gloomy pop song that is the sort of simple Nugget perfection exactly as envisioned by our garage forefathers. A tender song, born infectiously radio-friendly, despite the snowball´s-chance-in-hell this song has of getting airtime on most modern stations due to its fuzztoned, doomy strangeness. A song that, if covered by a more mainstream artist and given a stale, up with people facelift (and perhaps with some obnoxious drum-machine thrown in), would find a sure spot on the hit parade. But this quandary is more of a testament to the lame, play-it-safe times that we live in than to anything else. Caught In A Whirl- like the rest of this CD-is unabashedly impassioned music, inherently melancholic and very real. The release of this disc has not only ushered in an extremely exciting and promising Scandinavian garage rock talent, but has also effectively raised the quality bar as far as debut releases are concerned, both in Denmark as elsewhere. So check it out. Indulge in The Woodrose, and let its charms blow your mind! http://www.deadbeat.dk/music/records/babywoodrose.htm

BABY WOODROSE Blows Your Mind (Pan Records / 788) The guys from the Danish band On Trial ( www.ontrial.suite.dk ) are very prolific makers of good psychedelic music. They have given birth to many interesting project and solo albums ( Pandemonica, Spids Nogenhat... ). None of the records has let me down, and neither does this one. "Blows Your Mind" is a solo album by the drummer of On Trial, and he plays and sings everything on it. He´s quite a multitalented fellow, that´s for sure. Are all of the On Trial members so talented?! Here he performs under the pseudonym Lorenzo Woodrose... The album sounds a lot like it was recorded in the 60´s, which works like hell. So it´s 60´s psychedelic rock. There are faster, cheerful garage rockers ("Baby Blows Your Mind", "Right to Get High") but also beautiful, melodic and melancholic tracks full of emotion ("Caught in A Whirl", "Spinning Wheels of Fire", "Mind and Soul"...). They both have their moments. The guitar sounds are at times nicely sleazy, often you feel the need to jump up, dance and party. There are also experiences of floating in deep bongwaters. Some of the songs remind me of some pleasant 60´s pop hits, and yeah, I think I can even hear some steel guitar influences! Rather versatile, groovy old-school stuff. The CD covers are made by the mighty Malleus ( www.malleusdelic.com ), and really a sight to gaze upon... The lyrics are about smoking dope, sex, rock 'n 'roll, but also about even MORE deep issues. The music is reminiscent of many old bands, but let´s just say that the guy have been exposed to a lot of the same stuff that Dave from Monster Magnet. I think that Baby Woodrose can be labelled as a stoner rock band, but not one of the heaviest. This is an excellent CD, one of the best that I´ve encountered for a while. Summa summarum: psychedelic boogie for the third eye! Dig it baby! http://www.unimeri.com/PsychotropicZone/aviews.html#BABY