Troll Animated Music CD - Import

The Troll's sole album is extremely diverse late-'60s psychedelia. It's one of those records you can play over and over again without getting a grip on what exactly the group identity is. For many bands, such a description might be interpreted as a major compliment. The thing is, though, it's not a record you want to play over and over again, because the material isn't that good, and the eclecticism is not so much admirable versatility as contrived freakiness. At various times they sniff around hard rock, fruity pop-psychedelia, arch vaudevillian good-time music ("Professor Pott's Pornographic Projector" and "Have You Seen the Queen?"), and slightly bittersweet folk-rock-flavored pop-psych. The influences of Beatlesque melody and vocal harmonies are strongly felt at times, and there are some periodic interjections of the kind of varispeed vocals and odd effects that major labels only tolerated for a few years or so around the late '60s. There are glints of appealing fairytale aura pop-psychedelia here and there, as on "A Winter's Song," with its pseudo-British orchestration. Overall, it's an unmemorable mish-mash, however, and the far-out jollity and menace it seems to often aim for is more forced than inspired. ~ Richie Unterberger

At last, this 1968 release from the Chicago psychedelic rock quartet, The Troll, gets the Radioactive treatment. 2004.