Love - Love Lost
"Arthur Lee's seminal work as leader of the '60s band Love is treasured by discerning rock fans around the world. Lee's status as one of his era's preeminent
musical cult heroes has grown immensely in recent years, leading to generations of new fans rediscovering the artist's remarkable catalog. Unfortunately,
Lee and the band's body of available recordings is relatively small, making Sundazed Music's release of a previously-unheard full-length vintage Arthur
Lee and Love album a major musical event.
Love Lost was recorded in 1971, during a brief, little-known period during which Love was signed to Columbia Records. Lee and the then-current Love lineup--bassist
Frank Fayad, guitarist Craig Tarwater and drummer Don Poncher--recorded an album's worth of new material for the label. But after the band left the company,
the recordings sat unreleased and unheard until now. The material on Love Lost--comprised of the unreleased Columbia sessions, plus five unreleased acoustic
demos from the same period--captures Love in a transitional phase, charting the next step in Lee's idiosyncratic musical trajectory, following the lush
garage-psychedelia of the classics Da Capo and Forever Changes, and the bluesier direction of the hardrocking False Start and Out Here.
Many of the songs included on Love Lost would resurface, often in radically different form, on subsequent Love releases, and on Lee's fabled solo album
Vindicator. But the original versions included on Love Lost, boast a playful looseness that's absent from most of Lee's later work, as well as a raw, edgy
urgency that underlines his credentials as an early progenitor of punk-rock attitude. Love Lost also features three songs--"For a Day," "Trippin' & Slippin'"
and "C.F.I. Instrumental"--that have not previously been released, in any form.
With a treasure trove of vintage Love music that has never before been heard by fans, Love Lost is a major addition to Arthur Lee and Love's body of work,
and its release is a major event for Lee's fervent fan base."
Two tracks in. Rather unimpressed.
