Satya Sai Maitreya Kali

The mystery surrounding the two albums released in the early '70s by Maitreya Kali -- also known, confusingly, as Satya Sai Maitreya Kali -- has taken some time to be unraveled. Before getting into the details, the important thing to acknowledge is that they are among the more interesting rare late-'60s folk-rock psychedelic relics, alternating between full electric band arrangements and solo acoustic guitar ones. The electric numbers are rather like a cross between Buffalo Springfield and the most assertive cuts by the Monkees (a band that at moments could sound a lot more like Buffalo Springfield than many admit), though closer to Buffalo Springfield than to the Monkees. The mixture of folk-rock with harmonies, a slight country influence, and sunny Californian pop is also reminiscent of Merrell Fankhauser, a cult icon who is much better known than Maitreya Kali (though much lesser known than Buffalo Springfield and the Monkees). There are occasional spaced-out psychedelic effects, particularly in the vocals run through a Leslie effect on a couple of songs; the 12-minute suite "Knot the Freize" (sic) is a very ambitious string of discrete song sections, although otherwise the artist stuck to a pretty concise two-to-four-minute compositional structure.

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