Amber was an English prog-folk duo recording in 1970-71, although they were only released in 2000 on vinyl for the first time. One of them was Mac MacLeod, who had toured in Donovan’s backing band, and in fact the album’s sitar had been lent by Donovan himself (and had been given to the folksinger by George Harrison).
This is really off the deep end – pure, deep hippie mysticism, with all the immature baggage that implies. I’m talking about colors of an “angel mistress in my dreams” being “in your mind / with green, blue, and yellow.” I’m talking about personifying the embrace of springtime. I’m talking about auxiliary percussion (both bongos and tablas). Noodling guitar solos. I’m talking about the sun and the moon being “one and the same.” Okay, sorry. No more quotations of lyrics. You get the idea, I think.
But in all this is an uncanny reflection of the future – so many middling open-mic performances with impassioned, slightly off-time guitar strumming, cringeworthy and confusing vocals, and a recalcitrant sideman mumbling backing vocals and playing some extraneous accompaniment on a harmonica, a glockenspiel, or, hey, another acoustic guitar. So for that this is a fairly interesting document at moments.
Alright, one more quote, this one rivaling Genesis in its narrative drama – “the phoenix, she is gone / in the ashes of dawn.” That’s enough, all in fun, all in fun.
