Bay area mod rockers
Powder were incredibly short-lived, quickly running through a bizarre time line that included a brief stint as backing band for
Sonny & Cher, several name changes, and the recording of a few undeniably great tunes that got lost in the shuffle of the endless stream of Anglo-pop bands sprouting up in the wake of the British Invasion. Inspired to the point of obsession by
the Who circa
Sell Out,
the Zombies, and the janglier side of psychedelia, the band was formed by brothers
Richard and
Thomas Martin (known under the stage names
Richard &
Thomas Frost), going through various
Beatles-indebted incarnations before arriving at the lineup that would be
Powder in 1967. One of those acts,
Ray Columbus & the Art Collection had a minor garage psych hit with the loopy
13th Floor Elevators-ish "Kick Me (I Think I'm Dreaming)," which was buried in obscurity for a future
Nuggets crowd to unearth decades later. Once
Columbus left the band, they re-emerged as a more clean-cut entity simply known as
the Art Collection, offering up bubblegum sides like "I'm a Boy & You're a Girl" and an especially sunny reading of
the Who's "So Sad About Us." Somewhere in the middle of all this came the next phase of the band, with
Powder leaning heavily on the pop sweetness of the sound they spun as
the Art Collection, but weaving in darker themes on tunes like "Do I Love You" and the
Love-meets-
the Turtles weirdness of "What the People Said." All of these various phases are chronicled in
Ka-Pow! An Explosive Collection 1967-1968, with 26 tracks in total digging into the archive for an impressive cross-section of the band's largely unreleased recorded material. The majority of the disc focuses on a shelved album from
Powder recorded just before they imploded, turning in a fair amount of
Who knockoffs like "Rodeo," but also some seemingly accidentally tender tunes like "Flowers" or the jangly and juvenile "Ruby Red Lips." These naive and tuneful
Powder songs and the unabashedly innocent tunes recorded under
the Art Collection moniker are a fantastic complement to the more heavy-handed freakbeat tracks that fill much of the album, though both offer a glimpse of the
Martin brother's enthusiastic appropriation of the new sounds that were exploding from all sides in the late '60s. ~ Fred Thomas
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