World Psychedelia
11.59 : This is our Sacrifice of Praise (UK,1974,re.2007)**°
11.59 was a (holy-)7-piece Christian group of singers, guitarists, a percussionist and keyboard player. The influences of singing in church (kind of soft and airy harmony vocals) and trying to win other souls for baptism are clear influences but there’s more variety than that. The foundation of instrumentation mostly is a combination of various acoustic, often strummed, or a slide guitars with a bit of amplification, and electric bass guitar. Other arrangements are provided by flute, glockenspiel, vibes-keyboards, organ, drums or softer percussion. Additional textures are provided by mellotron here and there. The feeling is light, the female lead vocalist is soft and sweet, heavenly, with additional fragile harmony vocals, but there’s also a lead male vocalist on other songs. My favourite track is “By the waters of Babylon”. A bit different is the lighter, happy rhythmic “praise the lord”, which is overly happy, almost like a slapstick. Also noticeable is that the last few chords ends with the Kinks theme of “all day & all of the night”, perhaps a deliberate funny note. I am not sure if all the tracks are really existing psalm interpretations or not (as it seems to be). The album has its charm, and beauties, but it is rather light, and the happiness in some tracks makes it rather light without beaming me up yet.
The original label of 11.59, Dovetail, was specialised in Christian albums. Note that the later Ozric Tentacles related Dovetail Records label is in no way related to this first label.
