Love
Forever Changes

THE REVIEW

The third album by Love, a band from Los Angeles led by the talented and eccentric Arthur Lee, was released in June 1967, at the beginning of the "Summer of Love." But, aside from the historical concurrence, it shares little with other albums that served as the soundtrack to that summer, like "Surrealistic Pillow" by the Jefferson Airplane.

Moreover, Los Angeles was not San Francisco and the hippie (counter)culture was not a significant influence for Lee and his band, at least as inferred from the song lyrics. There is little or none of the "peace & love" rhetoric in this album, but rather a creeping unease that lurks here and there in the string arrangements, the disjointed vocals that peek out, and the almost neurotic use of the (few) electric guitar phrases.

What is astonishing about the album is the choice of orchestral accompaniment used in many tracks, including strings and mariachi trumpets, which distinctly reflect the influence of Chicano culture in Los Angeles. The pace of the compositions is always slow, except for the more lively "A House is not a Motel" and "Bummer in the Summer," and sometimes it seems to get lost in time, in a crystallized time where Lee dwells in ecstatic contemplation, as in "Andmoreagain." The fact that it is a deeply timeless work—a product of the ‘60s, yet fully enjoyable over thirty-five years later and therefore always current—is one of the greatest merits of this "Forever Changes." No title has ever been more prophetic in encapsulating the timelessness and fragile equilibrium of these compositions, an equilibrium that would soon unravel, undermined by heroin abuse, leading to the end of this lineup and, within a few years, of the band itself.