Norman Greenbaum – Spirit In The Sky 2025 Remaster – Album Review
23rd May 2025They’ve pressed Spirit in the Sky back into vinyl again, which is funny because that album never really left. It’s one of those records that lives in the crawlspace of your memory, like an old TV broadcast you half-saw on mescaline. Norman Greenbaum wasn’t trying to make a classic. He was trying to wiretap the afterlife.
I first heard this album, riding shotgun in a bread truck coated in Rolling Rock labels and desert dust. The radio was busted, so we rigged a turntable to the cigarette lighter and spun the LP off a paper plate. When the needle hit track two—boom—here comes that electric sermon, blown-out and staggering, dragging some kind of cosmic messiah behind it on a leash made of reverb.
That song—“Spirit in the Sky”—doesn’t sound like belief. It sounds like a belief after it’s been electrocuted. The fuzz tone is wrong in all the right ways, like the amp is melting, like the guitar was carved from a wasp nest. And Norman—he’s not singing, he’s testifying through a bad connection. Almost as if someone was praying into a CB radio at the edge of town.
But the rest of the album is where the real weirdness lives. “Junior Cadillac” slinks like a drunk preacher doing donuts in a parking lot. “The Power” sounds like a soul song that got lost in the desert and started hearing voices. “Tars of India” plays like it was assembled from fragments of someone’s half-remembered dream after watching a snake charmer and drinking cough syrup. None of it fits together cleanly. That’s why it works.
Greenbaum came at Rock sideways. This wasn’t the polished L.A. scene—this was back-alley psychedelia, junk-drawer gospel, bargain-bin mysticism. The whole record feels like it was put together in a garage that also doubled as a séance chamber. It’s full of dust, glue, and static electricity.
This new pressing keeps the grime. Kevin Gray cut it straight from the old reels, and you can hear the tape hiss breathing like a tired dog in the background. The jacket’s got that old glue-and-cardboard smell. It doesn’t feel like a reissue—it feels like a recovered object. Like something you found wrapped in newspaper at the bottom of a trunk labeled “open only if the sky turns green.”
Nobody makes records like this anymore because nobody would let them. Too much dirt, too much confusion, too much space. It doesn’t apologize. It doesn’t explain. It just is.
Spin it in the dark. Light something. See what answers back.
Score 9/10
Track List
Side A:
1. Junior Cadillac
2. Spirit in the Sky
3. Skyline
4. Jubilee
5. Alice Bodine
Side B:
1. Tars Of India
2. The Power
3. Good Lookin’ Woman
4. Milk Cow
5. Marcy
Label: Craft Recordings
Release: 13th June 2025
