Sold Date:
December 14, 2023
Start Date:
November 29, 2023
Final Price:
$49.00
(USD)
Seller Feedback:
1287
Buyer Feedback:
15
SEALED reissue edition. SOLD OUT and out of print for the last few years.
The definitive document of this all time classic. A much needed re-master and sounding better than any previous version.
Torch of the Mystics, the most popular and revered Sun City Girls album,
was recorded in the summer of 1988 and became the first LP released on
the Majora label in January of 1990 in an edition of 1000 copies (the
original CD version was released by Tupelo Recording Company in 1993 and
is long out of print). It has influenced and inspired a wide variety of
musicians and artists and continues to blow the minds of those hearing
it for the first time today. Arguably as unique a "psychedelic"
statement as anything else that has appeared since the early 1970s,
Torch of the Mystics cannot easily be compared to any other album you've
heard. Here is Byron Coley's original review from the May 1990 issue of
Spin magazine: "Just out of the box, and so majestic that it makes my
brain do out-skull jigs across my sizzling, glass-strewn floor, is the
Sun City Girls' new LP, Torch of the Mystics. As the heppest of you
undoubtedly know, the Girls are a death-defying improv-rock band from
Arizona who number no females amongst their membership, but who still
bleed profusely on a near-monthly basis. Their recordings tend to be
scattershot fiestas of lump-rich style gumbo, and Mystics is easily the
richest, lumpiest puddle of guh they've yet emitted. The sounds on this
record have moments of style-lifting, however, that should
endear them even to fans of olden-days out-rock (a notoriously Luddite
audience). At one point you'll 'hear' the circa-65 Mothers chanting
'Help I'm A Rock' while being pushed into a kettle of boiling oil by the
West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band; at another you'll swear that your
head is stuck in a lardy commode while one of the Fugs' ESP recording
sessions rages around your sweat-soaked and heaving trousers.
ET-fuckin-CETERA. But these 'cops' are not central parts of the whole.
They pop up, rather, amidst swirling, psychedelic ethnic forgeries that
will make Can fans renounce post-Landed Kraut Rock wax. Combined with
this is greasy, long-wound-out puling that could come from nowhere but
the small Arizona trailer park that birthed these honchos. The mix is
nothing short of bo-weaving and I can't imagine that this disc will have
many equals in 1990." Remastered by Mark Gergis.