Alexander "Skip" Spence
Oar

The urgency to express loneliness?

"Oar" is pure poetry, composed of many tiny black lights, probing deeply into the night the feeling of being alone; when everything surrounding us seems to want to be foreign, surrounded only by ourselves.

Spence emerges a bit bewildered from his experiences with Jefferson Airplane and Moby Grape, with whom he collaborated in 1967 and 1968, presences so overwhelming they led him to distance himself from everything that was the kaleidoscopic world of psychedelic Frisco. I like to imagine him as a solitary wanderer in the Nevada desert in search of shamans and enlightening visions; a bit like a subdued Jim Morrison, forlornly waiting at the blue bus stop, despairing at not finding the coveted snake to ride? becoming more and more entranced by the silent cool of the vast night of wind and sand, like the tired cowboy resting by the fire with only his guitar for company.

The album exudes a storm of words, soothed in the flow of soft and melancholic arpeggios, traversing decades of American tradition with country softening the blues and folk blending with psych reminiscences. Skip describes the imperceptible shifts in the sand lines' profile, the precious liquid soul contained within the cactus's bristly armor, the calm majestic advance of the scorpion, and the more nervous and seductive glide of the snake? he paints an almost endless series of broken hearts and impossible loves, eventually losing himself in the mysticism that carries him to the "Dixie Peach Promenade (Yin For Yang)" or into his continuous distorted trips "Grey/Afro".

Too forgotten to be true and too true to be forgotten, Alexander ‘Skip’ Spence remains in his private oblivion to the end, preparing for the renouncement of the world and its distortions, as is happening in the dark and gloomy paradise within Roger Keith "Syd" Barrett's mind; with whom he is often compared.

Mad, tender, and visionary?