Blossom Toes

We Are Ever So Clean is long overdue for reissue treatment. Worshipped by record collectors and ’60s music buffs, this album is just as good, if not better than many of the revered musical works of its time. Blossom Toes were unique; though they were, by most accounts, a psych band, they were psychedelic in form rather than substance. Their songs, when taken apart, are somewhat proper and very British (right down to the silly, nonsensical lyrics). However, these parts were often delivered in shuffled fragments, sometimes collapsing into sheer cacophony. The result is a weird mosaic of gentlemanly Ray Davies-style pop, with the clean pieces comprising a brilliantly mixed-up whole. Released in 1967, the album could have contended with Piper at the Gates of Dawn had the band members been capable of recreating it onstage; they used mostly hired hands during recording sessions. It’s a shame! Plenty of records are famously underrated but We Are Ever So Clean is not just fodder for obscurantists; its failure to become a classic is genuinely perplexing. Rarely is something so ambitious executed so nicely. To think of The Wall after hearing it is frustrating indeed.