KALEIDOSCOPE (UK): The Second Album

Original released on LP Fontana STL 5491

(UK 1969, April 11)

For their second and last album, Kaleidoscope delivered something an awful lot like their debut, a body of pleasant, trippy, spacy raga-rock, with the main difference that they pushed the wattage a little harder on their instruments - they'd also been performing pretty extensively by the time of their second long-player, and a lot of the music here was material that they'd worked out on-stage in very solid versions. The result is a record just as pretty as their debut but a little punchier and more exciting within each song than their first album. The title track is also one of the more beautiful psychedelic effects pieces of its period, while "A Story from Tom Bitz" is crunchy folk-rock, "(Love Song) For Annie" represents a more lyrical brand of druggy folk-rock, and "If You So Wish" shifts over to Moody Blues-style ballad territory circa late 1968 and early 1969. (Bruce Eder in AllMusic)

KALEIDOSCOPE (UK) Debut Album

Original released on LP Fontana STL 5448

(UK 1967, November 24)

1967 was truly one of the greatest years in the history of music and the psychedelic explosion it saw was part of what made it great. "Tangerine Dream" by the British Kaleidoscope band (different from the American Kaleidoscope band from the same era) is a real hidden gem masterwork of psychedelic pop. Unabashedly sweet, sugary, fantastical of course surreal in both lyrics and sounds, "Tangerine Dream" is the kind of innocent, child like fantasy psychedelia that Syd Barrett perhaps wanted to produce but instead produced much more unnerving and off kilter material. Kaleidoscope produces stuff with darker edges here too, but nothing is ever has the unnerving edges of what Syd Barrett produced earlier that same year on Pink Floyd's debut, "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn". This is unabashedly, sweet, joyful, innocent fairy tale psychedelia and it's beautiful, endearing music. A sort of Simon and Garfunkel meets Pink Floyd sound, but honestly around the same as both of those groups so its hard to say they were influences (more contemporaries). Full of beautiful mind bending psych pop, each song builds into the next and its one of the better albums of 1967 - which is saying a lot. Every song is a winner, honestly. (in AllMusic)