World Psychedelia
Shin Jung Hyun & The Men : It's a Lie (KO,1972,re.2005)****°
airplayed : Tr.2, "It's a Lie" 23 min, Tr.3, "A Woman in the Mist" 12 min 35
On the first track, the band develops much more their style into psychedelic and greatly rocking sounds with nice oboe, harmony vocals, and strong groove. The second and longest long track is psychedelic bliss, a 23 minute excursion with a beautiful improvised, stretched and at times weird psychedelic organ solo, some psychedelic clarinet solo, some nice electric guitar improvisations (while the drums remain rather steady in their rhythms), concluding with the song theme with a psychedelic rock background. Also the last track is a great band improvisation of repetitive bass/organ and a freedom for the guitarist, and a bit further on for the organist. Amongst the best and most convincing Korean albums, and surely one of the most psychedelic ones. A must-have.
Forced Exposure : "'My Job is to Make Rock Music in Korean Style'. Guitarist Shin Jung Hyun is considered the father of Korean rock music, his career beginning in the mid-50's playing at post-war US Army bases. During the late sixties and early seventies his garage bands Donkeys and Questions composed hit singles and provided backing for the popular female vocalists of the time, such as Kim Jung-Mi and the Pearl Sisters. But it is the 1972-1973 recordings with his psychedelic group The Men that gets the blood flowing of international rock music explorers. Due to commercial demands of the record labels, the original LP's were configured as a side of shorter, poppier tracks with guest singers, while the flip was where the band was allowed to 'stretch out'. World Psychedelia has selected three of the best of these longer excursions -- 'Beautiful Country', 'It's A Lie' and 'A Woman In The Mist' -- forty-four minutes of oil-emulsion-slide acid rock with fluid guitar, organ textures and an occasional ethnic woodwind to gently remind the listener that the origin is SK not SF."
Dusty Groove : "Groovy psychedelia from early 70s Korea -- the titanic self-titled effort by Shin Jung Hyen & The Men! The notes and titles are in Korean, so we can't offer much in the way of biographical or historical details -- but the sound is rich with soaring organ work, groovy, groovy harmony vocals, chiming guitars and drums -- with epic length numbers that really set sights on the most ambitious and groovy late psychedelic rock and pop -- and totally hits the mark! 3 massive tracks (titles are Korean), the shortest nearly 10 minutes and the longest nearly 23 minutes long!"
Other Music : "...The record at hand was recorded with his group The Men and probably dates from around 1973. It's comprised of three wonderfully long psychedelic rock jams, and on every single song his rhythm section provides a chugging forward beat (imagine a Korean Neu! perhaps) over which Hyun and his cohorts play astonishingly inventive solos. The band will periodically drop out and Hyun will then chime in with his lovely sing/whispering and somehow turn a 20-minute extended jam into a pop tune."
Korean blog : "Yoon Yong Kyoon provides the (male) vocals for the first side of the third "and the Men" LP released in 1973. The only song on Side Two is "The Men's" 22 plus minute psychadelic classic, "It's a Lie" (Ka Ja Mal I Ya)"
Aquarius Records : "Another one for everybody who loved the groovy HE 6 album we listed not long ago! Guitar player Shin Jung Hyun was a big deal in the South Korean rock n' roll scene, going as far back as the '50s, when he played for the GIs on American military bases. His music even was apparently the subject of a tribute album a few years ago. In the late sixties/early seventies psychedelia took hold, and Shin Jung Hyun did it as well or better than anyone... totally funky, tripped-out, acid-rock freakdom. Lots and lots of acid-fuzz guitar jamming with bass, drums, organ and some flute too. Maybe for that reason this reminds us a bit of Dungen, actually. The material on this album (which may actually be entited It's A Lie, we're not sure) dates around 1972 or so. Though 44 minutes long, there's just three songs here, "Beautiful Country", "It's A Lie" and "Woman In The Mist", all consequently long and meandering (yet rhythmically tight, believe it), and mostly instrumental. It seems that these three might have originally been the extended flip-sides to shorter, more commerical cuts, compiled onto this disc for the benefit of anyone into far-out psych jamming as wedded to Asian pop of the era. Not so much heavy as it is simply seriously groovy and right-on, Shin Jung and The Men blend garage rock/surf/Frisco ballroom styles into a head-nodding, toe-tapping, mind-blowing, utterly dazzling unravelling of whatever "song" it seems they started off playing. That means: the singer does some nice kinda soft psych pop crooning to start things off, but he soon disappears and the band just takes off into outer realms, doing their thing and stretching out without care for commerical (radio play) considerations. Eventually the singer shows up again, but it's as if he left the room and then came back in some minutes later to finish the song, utterly unaware of what his band had been up to in the interim! We can only imagine what their live shows were like, must have been killer -- as this disc is, killer."
Rockadrome : "..there’s no mystery about the greatness of the three long tracks on this disc! minimal moody vocals don’t interfere in the slightest with the incredible fuzz and wah-wah guitar solos, the groovy and weird keyboards, the monster drum solos, or the oboe (yep, the oboe); truly psychedelic songs with all the strangeness that a non-Anglo approach to trippy music seems to engender, with touches of the Doors and early Hawkwind, if you need non-Asian reference points; I now fully comprehend why Koreans call this Shin Jung Hyun’s best record, and “a psychedelic gem.
