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With a sound that manages to embrace all the best aspects of heavy metal, yet remains refreshingly free of the cliché's that often blight the scene, Japan's FLOWER TRAVELLIN' BAND presents their five-song album from 1971 with this release. The fourth full-length by the Flower Travellin' Band, 1971's SATORI, is a buried treasure of hard rock that resurfaced via reissue in the mid '00s to serious critical plaudits. Virtually unknown in North America and Europe for decades--except to serious stoner metal fans and collectors--the Flower Travellin' Band artistically peaked with this five-track monster, an opus that cast the quartet as the Japanese Black Sabbath. Finding the common ground between Sabbath and Can, SATORI's first two tracks stand up with any recordings in both psychedelic and metal history. "Part I" features fuzz chords backing singer Joe Yamanaka's memorably satisfying, Tarzan-esque vocal hook while "Part II" foregrounds guitarist Hideki Ishima's serpentine East-meets-West leads. The album is largely instrumental--with Yamanaka making occasional vocal cameos in Ishima's electric froth--but remains an epic distillation of the era when heavy psych morphed into metal.
