Bay area mod rockers Powder were incredibly short-lived, quickly running through a bizarre time line that included a brief stint as backing band for Sonny & Cher, several name changes, and the recording of a few undeniably great tunes that got lost in the shuffle of the endless stream of Anglo-pop bands sprouting up in the wake of the British Invasion. Inspired to the point of obsession by the Who circa Sell Out, the Zombies, and the janglier side of psychedelia, the band was formed by brothers Richard and Thomas Martin (known under the stage names Richard & Thomas Frost), going through various Beatles-indebted incarnations before arriving at the lineup that would be Powder in 1967. One of those acts, Ray Columbus & the Art Collection had a minor garage psych hit with the loopy 13th Floor Elevators-ish "Kick Me (I Think I'm Dreaming)," which was buried in obscurity for a future Nuggets crowd to unearth decades later. Once Columbus left the band, they re-emerged as a more clean-cut entity simply known as the Art Collection, offering up bubblegum sides like "I'm a Boy & You're a Girl" and an especially sunny reading of the Who's "So Sad About Us." Somewhere in the middle of all this came the next phase of the band, with Powder leaning heavily on the pop sweetness of the sound they spun as the Art Collection, but weaving in darker themes on tunes like "Do I Love You" and the Love-meets-the Turtles weirdness of "What the People Said." All of these various phases are chronicled in Ka-Pow! An Explosive Collection 1967-1968, with 26 tracks in total digging into the archive for an impressive cross-section of the band's largely unreleased recorded material. The majority of the disc focuses on a shelved album from Powder recorded just before they imploded, turning in a fair amount of Who knockoffs like "Rodeo," but also some seemingly accidentally tender tunes like "Flowers" or the jangly and juvenile "Ruby Red Lips." These naive and tuneful Powder songs and the unabashedly innocent tunes recorded under the Art Collection moniker are a fantastic complement to the more heavy-handed freakbeat tracks that fill much of the album, though both offer a glimpse of the Martin brother's enthusiastic appropriation of the new sounds that were exploding from all sides in the late '60s.
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