Recorded principally at Abbey Road Studios, London, England in September 1969.

Personnel: Roy Harper (vocals, guitar, electric guitar, saxophone, keyboards); Tony Visconti (recorder); Keith Emerson (keyboards); Brian Davison (drums).

Singer/songwriter Roy Harper came upon the mid-1960s London folk scene alongside the likes of Jackson C. Frank, Sandy Denny, et al., and his 1970 album, FLAT BAROQUE & BERSERK, was the final installment of his initial folkie phase. With his next release, the rapturously received STORMCOCK, he would incorporate expansive prog-rock flavoring into his style, but FLAT BAROQUE is a sparse, acoustic-based effort that focuses squarely on Harper's poetic lyrics and (at that point) Dylanesque tunes. He's backed here by Keith Emerson's pre-ELP outfit, the Nice, offering a slight foreshadowing of things to come, but progressive epics were not yet a part of Harper's approach.

Roy Harper's fourth album found him in an acoustic folkie mode more often than not, though as usual (for circa late-'60s Harper) there were detours into pretty rocky items on occasion. It's not much of either a progression or a slide from the lyrically convoluted, somewhat but not incredibly melodic path he had established with his prior work. "I Hate the White Man," however, is certainly one of his most notable (and notorious) compositions, a spew of lilting verbiage that's hard to peg. It could be irony, it could be ironic self-hatred, it could be muddled reflections on the chaos that is the modern world, or it could be a combination of all of them. There are gentler items, sometimes with subdued harmony vocals and orchestration, that sound rather like Harper's most acerbic side sanded off with edges of Al Stewart, Donovan, or Tim Hardin; "Another Day" is the prettiest of those. The atypical "Hell's Angels," on the other hand, has a twisted, chunky rock feel rather like the solo work of another of producer Peter Jenner's clients, Syd Barrett. ~ Richie Unterberger