The Fox is a really interesting british psychedelic rock and prog band, they recorded this album called "For Fox Sake" in what was essentially an all nighter, all tracks were recorded live in one to a few takes maximum, and they thought this was their "test recording" for the record company to approve of them but then the suits said "ship it" and despite the band not being happy with the state of things, what we got was a collection of really solid, fun tracks. If you'd like to check out The Fox, I'd say listen to the entire album, but if that's too much I can recommend a few of my favorite cuts, so here's a short list:
- Look In The Sky, by far my favorite track in this collection of psychedelic, pop and prog tracks. Vocals feel like the highlight of this one, and they're punchy, energetic and fun, but they're also accompanied by solid guitar work and organ playing. it's good stuff.
You probably noticed the cover on the thumbnail isn't the one I showed above and that's because the one in the thumbnail's the original UK album cover, which in my opinion looks kinda worse than the US one, but it's the definitive one due to them being from the UK. I feel like the US cover has more of a psych/prog rock album cover vibe to it, if that makes any sense at all? It's kinda sad that it reads Volume 1, Volume 2 never ended up happening despite work starting on it. To give credit to the UK cover, it's a goofy fox so it can't be terrible just on that alone. Anyways back to songs:
- Mr Blank is a really fun track, feels like it's a track with (almost) no frills, they put down the essentials to make a really good track, a simple melody that's backed up by solid playing and vocals with some conviction.
- Madame Magical is a phenomenal album closer that despite its lengthy runtime does not feel like it drags in the slightest, the song's always moving onto various different ideas from start to finish, it just keeps you floating and enjoying whatever comes next, occasionally coming back to its iconic chorus. Guitarrist Steve Brayne wrote this one for his girlfriend at the time and the "Summer of Love" really worked out for how it influenced his music influences and chops.
I started writing this whole post because as I was reading this 1970 edition of Billboard I spotted this album in their review section but the scan quality was so bad it was essentially unreadable, which prompted me to wanna talk about it myself. The Fox aren't exactly a one hit wonder as they never made it big, a ton of late 60s to early 70s one album bands didn't, and I can say with certainty that the Fox holds up super well in that niche of "bands most people probably have never fucking heard of but are really good and I want people to know about them more!", it almost feels like I have to talk about bands like these because algorithms don't recommend them to people, and one of the best ways to discover music, I've found, is by browsing databases (discogs) and word of mouth.
When you start going down the rabbit hole of psychedelic rock there's probably no bottom, there's always solid gold to find, but failing that there's always nuggets. I think The Fox withstood the test of time (and the album got reissued a couple times even!) because they did some really solid work, made with passion. Always a rare treat to find stuff like that when exploring old music.
my main source for brushing up on what I vaguely remembered of The Fox was this interview with Steve Brayne, guitarist and singer for The Fox. Many thanks for Marmalade Skies for maintaining that website.