Blow Your Cool

The rare recordings on this 20-song-deep prog-rock compilation span the golden age of British and European prog nuggets. Blow Your Cool focuses on tracks from 1969 to 1974 that have yet to appear on any other collection. Paradise Hammer’s “To Live” opens with bouncy organs, heady arrangements, and some of the genre’s most congruent vocal harmonies since Yes. (That song surfaced in 1971 as a b-side to “1 + 1 = 2.”) The following “Turn Me Loose” by Barry Freeman & Strange Power is comparatively conservative, with piano in place of organ and Freeman’s no-nonsense singing. But Primitive Man’s “Major Barmy from the Army” gets weird, with searing fuzz-guitar leads, underwater vocal effects, and lyrics more surreal than a painted landscape of melting clocks. With “Much Too Much,” Dream Police use Jeff Beck’s “Shapes of Things” as a template to let Hamish Stuart cut looser than he ever would later in Average White Band. Ferris Wheel’s “Can’t Stop Now” shows that prog-rock wasn’t just a boys' club, as a young Linda Lewis sings lead.