This amazing album illuminates the universality of the 60’s psychedelic rock phenomena. The five teenagers who founded what was to become the Maxwells first met at the Danish Church School in Copenhagen where they sang together in the choir. First working as a cover band, they added horns as their style gradually began to show the influence of such psychedelic groups as Jefferson Airplane, the Doors and the Greatful Dead. ‘67 was their breakthrough year with the band’s first hit single, an appearance in the opera The Labyrinth at Copenhagen’s Royal Theater, and opening for the Mothers of Invention. German jazz guru Joachim Ernst Berendt was so impressed that he immediately signed the group for this record. There are shades of the Doors and Jefferson Airplane in the vocals on Ester as well as an expressive trombone solo, and on the Rock ballad Free To Bee the sophisticated vocal harmonies reflect on the Beach Boys’ psychedelic period. The ten-minute piece Make It Break It – Beni Riamba brings to mind such horn bands as Cold Blood and Tower of Power before tripping off into an Afro-rock feel with wide-open improvisations humor. The band continues in a similar open-ended mode as it takes a kaleidoscopic stroll down Maxwell Street. With horns riffing and guitars wailing, What’s A Smock has the band displaying its own brand of psychedelic rock. It passes the acid test!
