It’s pretty intresting to me. Once again, Andy Votel, who did the compilation on Prog is not a four letter Word, went back to his Vinyl Collection to make a mixture of the prog and early heavy metal groups from bands such as Black Sabbath, Aphrodite’s Child, Gracious!, Warhorse, and the jazz rock sound of Affinity featuring Linda Hoyle. The Vertigo label is one of the true defining lables that what Andy did is to pay a tribute to Vertigo Records with this mix CD. This Mix CD of Vertigo Mixed is one of those albums that will get you get started to hunt for some of the albums that appeared on the Vertigo label to get your juice pumping!

Vertigo Mixed starts off with the rain and bells and then the string quartet sets the mood for the album as it kicks in with Linda Hoyle’s Morning for One and then snippets of Gracious’s Introduction, a symphonic prog of a psychedelia roller-coaster ride. And then it becomes a full throttle heavy jazz meets metal with excerpts from Colosseum’s The Kettle, Manfred Mann’s One Way Glass, and Aphrodite’s Child Battle of the Locusts while May Blitz’s proto-Sabbath punk sound of For Madmen Only gets the Vertigo treatment including Marsha Hunt’s own funakdelic taste of Blaxploitation with (Oh No Not) The Beast Day.

And while the snippets of the album feature some dreamlike ambient Mellotron adventure whirlpool of terror zooming forward with Beggars Opera’s Time Machine and Cressida’s dream machine taste of Let them come when they will, It’s almost that the Vertigo spaceship has taken the listener into a combining land of loud planets that are jamming 24 hours day and night with no stopping whatsoever for the Prog and Heavy Metal nuts to go crazy. It is defintely the ravages of time for Andy Votel and Vertigo to get the prog collector’s wanting more and more.