221: Split, by Groundhogs

Groundhogs (United Kingdom)
Split (1971)
8 tracks, 40 minutes
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For me, this album is like a distillation of British hippy rock of the late 60s-early 70s. All the way through there are elements alike with artists such as Jethro Tull, Blodwyn Pig, Jimi Hendrix, Captain Beefheart and a million psychedelic bands of the time, all refined into one sound. There’s an extravagant looseness to the music that skews it to a slightly odd angle and adds to its trippy atmosphere, but it’s saved from sounding sloppy by the tightness of the compositions – the eight songs on this album all have a direction that they are headed towards, and even if they take some detours here and there, there’s no rambling. It’s like if garage-band jamming had a very clear purpose in mind. That at-once looseness and tightness of atmosphere is also helped by the tightness of the group itself, with Tony McPhee on guitars and vocals (and very much the leading man of the band), Peter Cruikshank on bass and Ken Pustelnik on drums, there’s no extraneous sonic elements that need to be built into textures that simply work perfectly as a trio.

The fuzz of the guitars, the crunchiness of the vocals, the chugging rhythms and the clashing cymbals show Groundhogs’ place in the evolution of heavy metal, but the structure of the compositions and their slightly mystical and conceptual airs also foreshadow the prog rock of the latter part of the decade. But me being me, the track that always stands out as a highlight is the last one, ‘Groundhog’, the song from which the group took their name. Interestingly, it’s a song written by the artist featured yesterday, John Lee Hooker. It’s clearly his too: his trademark style is left intact, and the cover is a very faithful one, stripped back as it is from the rest of the album. It’s an almost-solo by McPhee (with just Pustelnik’s kick drum keeping beat), shredding up the electric slide guitar alongside his relaxed but weighty vocals. One of the things I like most about this track is its placement as the album closer. There are blues bits all the way through the album, but ‘Groundhog’ coming at the end is like a proper full stop, as if to say ‘that’s what we are and what we can be, but where we came from is just as important.’ After some strange directions in the rest of the album, the simple, raw Hooker groove brings it all back down to earth with as much grit as any other track.

Split is a great album to get your fix of psychedelic rock with a bluesy tinge without having to stray into acid trips and badly-played sitar territory – Groundhogs keep their feet on the ground even when their brains and voices and fingers maybe travelling a little outside our usual astral plane.