The sun here destroys. Forever Changes is the sound of LA discovering it has no center in 1967 and starting to spin anyway. This album is Arthur Lee being smarter than his city, with snot crystals on his pants and a world full of melodies and production ideas in his head. This isn’t a song album or a beat album or a hip poetry album—this is an entire city diffracted through about forty or fifty micro ideas and then reassembled. Guns, bluebirds, bummers and the most genuinely psychedelic and floral arrangements of the era. If you don’t get it at first, just wait. It took me decades to hear it, and a few years in LA. It’s not really an attempt to be a band or have a style, this album. It’s Arthur Lee throwing the entirety of the present moment into the studio and following it all at the same time.