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Rating: A pivotal album in the underground scene and in the broader sense of English progressive: all of this is 'Wasa-Wasa', released in 1969 and produced by Peter Jenner, who was already the manager of Pink Floyd.
Famous for its free concerts and its distinct politicization, the band, despite its hard and uncompromising sound, finds favor with a significant part of the audience during its heyday. 'Wasa-Wasa' is without a doubt their musical manifesto, the one in which they most successfully blend the grating and hoarse voice of the leader with genuinely pounding rhythms that some might find too repetitive and echoes of Beefheart's blues and Zappa's exquisite satire against the system (the relentless manifesto of "Death Of An Electric Citizen", characterized by distorted guitars). The Zappaesque parody reaches its peak in the killer refrain of one of their most famous songs, "American Boy Soldier", while the acid sound becomes once again overpowering in the tense "Why Can't Somebody Love Me?".
"Neptune" in my opinion is an absolute masterpiece concerning almost dark atmospheres and precedes a song like "Evil" which, after the mocking and thunderous initial laugh, follows the Hendrix-style guitar in a swirl of nearly disconnected voices that are the prelude to the anguished yet highly enjoyable "Crying", boasting a frantic finale. The last two songs of the album are the powerful and weighty "Love In The Rain", where the leader's voice splendidly mediates between Osbourne and Hendrix, and the desperate "Dawn Crept Away", with sudden changes in rhythm and stylistic choices and overlapping voices that could create a genuine aura of mystery for listeners not well-versed in this genre.
In the remastered version that I received, there are some noteworthy bonus tracks such as the singular (for the band) folk-rock of "Messin' With The Kid" and the classic rock‘n’roll of "Waterloo Man" and "Tellin' Everybody", as well as a piece more oriented towards psychedelia like "Jacqueline" and the long, acid jam "Untitled Freak Out", all seeming to originate from some demos from the period between 1965 and 1966.
In conclusion, we are talking about an album where the openly anarchic and libertarian approach of the Edgar and Steve brothers distinctly stands out, who in subsequent albums will gradually change their sound but always remain faithful to their life ideals and their conception of rock as a vehicle for information, with another crystalline pinnacle reached during the performance of "Out Demons Out", a Fugs' song, at the Glastonbury Festival in 1971.
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