The Fugs, The Fugs (side A)

The Fugs' second album marks a huge step up in professionalism from their brutally primitive debut. Of course, 1966's The Fugs is still far from slick. Some competent sidemen add a sense of conventional musicality, but the absurd and jarring lyrics still jump out, and Ed Sanders's vocal style remains very blunt. The songwriting is generally traditional, though the album ends with the long, abstract piece "Virgin Forest". Richard Alderson's engineering does a nice job of capturing the Fugs' primitivism with a tasteful balance of roughness and clarity (long before the expression "lo-fi" signified a fashionable aesthetic statement).