Obscurities have taken over the last few days of my listening. It ain’t a bad thing, but at the same time, the average unknowns aren’t really too much more than that two word description even if the album cover and various descriptions splattered all of the internets might make one believe otherwise. Vulcan (Lyle Steece), much like any self released ‘70s psych recording sounds something akin to terrific in any brief description. And it’s not bad, by any stretch of the imagination, but the pervasive mentioning of Hendrix obfuscates any genuine description of the music here. The lone release from this Iowa band/one man show, Meet Your Ghost, clocks in more time under the banner of hard rock than anything that Hendrix was related to.

The all too rare – and recently re-released, but quickly snapped up - Meet Your Ghost, despite being conceived of in the middle of nowhere is pretty easily linked to hard rock stuffs from the ‘70s. “Count On Us Next Time” could be off of any power trio’s album from the era. It’s all messed up, sloppy and slow in places, but that simple blues riff that gets driven down into the dirt is something that was so pervasive at the time, that even ‘underground’ groups had to cop it at least once.

One should be hesitant to toss around Zeppelin as some sort of musical touchstone, but Steece unquestionably owned most of that Brit band’s catalog. The untitled, eight minute instrumental included here should attest to the ownership of those aforementioned albums, but it might too hint at the love of sludgy Sabbath stuffs. The plodding pace, purposefully obtuse feedback and squalling noise that precedes the track’s conclusion presents ample proof of the Sabbath tie. So in Vulcan’s basement daze, Steece was able to cobble together some radio elements in order to wind up with a transient album of rock.

Never sitting on anything for too long – apart from some of those seemingly endless solos – Vulcan choose a specific era of rock to replicate and it succeeded kinda. Meet Your Ghost wasn’t primed for commercial success, but it certainly has, in latter years, garnered enough attention to receive a number of reissues. The fervor to hunt down the scant few original discs, which were only sold in and around Steece’s home town of Spencer, Iowa, has resulted in some spurious business deals and some bootlegging.

There’re probably less original copies of this disc than one might guess – I’m sure some got left in someone’s mom’s basement and were then tossed, not to mention the copies that were surely destroyed during drunken/stoned evenings in a Midwest snow storm. But there’s been some discussion as to how to decipher whether your copy is an original or some poorly contrived knock off. There apparently was a photo pasted on the back cover of the original as well as some white out that was applied to the actual label on the album. But probably if you shelled out enough cash to find an ‘original’ copy, you already knew that. I knew, though, that you have a ridiculous amount of disposable income.