Synanthesia is another 1960's band whose sole album was set to be reevaluated when the term acid-folk gained internet traction. Sounding somewhat like a collaboration between the Incredible String Band and the Third Ear Band, with the occasional jazz band thrown in the mix, it does show potential, but instead of making a consistent whole out of those different registers they mostly opted for mischievously flipping between them (and with it maybe prefiguring, even if in less extreme and elaborate form, some of Comus' rabid antics). More problematically, they do it within the structure of individual songs, wherein, like kids building elaborate lego towers just to smash them back into lego pieces with their godzilla figurines, they systematically apply themselves to break up whatever interesting moods we generally and frustratingly do get promised throughout the record (right from the initial "Minerva", whose unfortunate hippie-punkish chorus carelessly thrashes all the gentle groundwork laid before it). No surprise, it's when they settle down for one and only one idea, no overthinking or changing gears, just some relaxed fingerpicking, a nice melody, maybe a little flute or vibes on top, that you get a real winner from beginning to end, like "Rolling and Tumbling" or "Peek Strangely and Worried Evening", whose pairing of a pastoral template with a fair share of lyrical lecherousness (adding to an overall penchant for mythological references) further reinforces that potential Comus kinship and their prospective acid folk credentials. Ultimately, these may very well have won them a very specific footnote in music history; but I am left wondering if a little less acid in their folk couldn't have earned them a more substantive claim to some kind of posterity not so dependent on niche tastes.
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