Sonics, The - Introducing The Sonics – New LP

This 1967 release (some place it at 1966 likely because everything on it was likely recorded in 1966 or earlier) by The Sonics was sort of an anthology (while folks today tend to call everything a comp, I reserve the term comps for various artists collections...but I might be alone with that, as in books, anthology usually refers to various artists collection), this collection featuring Sonics' then latest recordings as well as some of their earliest recordings...some of their first and some of their last. Over the decades, this collection has been released under a variety of titles, this reissue housing the original cuts from the 1967 collection and adding some cuts.  

While it's a simplification to land everything on 1967 as the year rock started PROGressing into head rock, the year definitely seems the key starting and turning point.  But bands like The Sonics didn't give a rat's ass (but did split up, perhaps  thinking their time had passed forever as rock "progressed.")  Meanwhile, in Detroit, MC5 was releasing their "I Can Only Give You Everything" single (cover of the Them single from 1966), and the Bob Seger System recording their "2 + 2" single... the sounds from this Sonics album and the others now perhaps seeming ahead of their time but even more so they were behind the times, ignoring all the trends of country rock, folk rock, jazz rock, and progressive rock...while 1964-1966 provided so many bridges from the time previous to the time to come, until the Nuggets comp came out in the early 1970s, most of the bridges ignored American bands because very often the bands were one-hit wonders, but The Sonics were unique for an American band, hitting it hard in 1964 with plenty of great cuts, blasting out of the world before (with folks like Link Wray, Bo Diddley and The Wailers) and helping carry the baton through the mid-1960s and passing the baton to folks like MC5, this brand of raw garage blasting out of the sounds of years earlier and bridging that world to...Stooges 1969...and then to most of the great rock n roll records of the decades that followed.  -- winch