"Many plays were required for me to get a handle on this obscurity, and I'm still not sure what to make of it. The brainchild of an older guy who looks more like a liberal arts college professor than a rock artist, the music is a strange hybrid of styles, partly because Hubbs recruited a much younger band of musicians to commit his opaque visions to vinyl. Loud arena-rock fuzz riffs and dense keyboard support wild Hendrix-flavored feedback leads and the rare treat of deadpan ensemble singing. These odd vocals have a certain Zappa flavor but remain largely unintelligible, although some clarity is provided on a few tracks with female lead vocals. The loud, compressed recording and buzzing wall of keyboard makes this sound almost like King Crimson (or Freedom's Children) at times, but this is surely mere coincidence. The songs are actually pretty good with frequent minor key hooks, and the sub-Starship playing isn't bad for a local band, but the strange, listless choral singing pulls Crystal in yet another direction. Hubbs presumably had written his tunes with other aesthetic models in mind than early '80s power-rock, and out of this unusual mix emerges a record that, in its total obscurity, manages to find some previously unclaimed musical ground. At this point, only two copies are known to exist. A few years after making the LP, Stan Hubbs became one of the few persons in history to smoke so much pot that he died."(Acid Archives)"FINALLY the official vinyl reissue of Stan Hubb's 1982 Crystal LP is available. 500 faithful repros were made of this confounding slab of stoner rock, each including a replica of the original 16 page booklet. Crystal was recorded in Hubb's rural Sonoma county living room and just like the original, this reissue was mastered and cut by Paul Stubblebine, pressed by RTI and housed in heavy, old-style jackets." (Companion)
Dude...A serious heavy riffin' obscurity! Stan Hubb's = Wow! Quite the artifact of 80's outsider rock. Big ups to hemptimes for this gnarly rip.
Download Link: Removed by polite request from Companion Records. Buy this record.
1. Sundance
2. Joe and Gina
3. Let's Go On Back to Camp
4. Young Saint Augustine
5. Juggernaut
6. The Best Man for Some Jobs is a Woman
7. Golden Rose
8. Crystal
9. Seems Like it's a Rich Man's World
