Reviews
Rick Wakeman
The Red Planet R&D MEDIA
Ground control to Major Rick.
What a clever Rick, releasing his new album just as a flotilla of rockets is launched at the Red Planet with the collective aim of proving whether there is, or was, life on Mars, opening up a wealth of soundtrack and other marketing possibilities. And if they do find frozen water under the surface, or even a microbe or two, no one is better placed to perform the album on ice.
The instrumental album’s style deliberately harks back to prog’s – and Wakeman’s – halcyon days of the early 70s, and he relishes the chance to slip back into his old habits with the added spice of the sampled keyboard sounds that are now available to him, starting with a thunderous church organ on Ascraeus Mons.
The English Rock Ensemble are no mere backing band, either; just check out Lee Pomeroy’s bass at the start of Valles Marineris.
Hugh Fielder
L.A. Witch
Play With Fire SUICIDE SQUEEZE
Second dose of headphone melters from cult psych weirdos.
Not quite the cracked-leather, mascara-smeared death-trip crystal machine their name (and first album) suggests, the now sorta-famous L.A. Witch have settled into something akin to dusty, psychedelic, immaculately stoned surfer jams that sound sorta like JAMC wandering bug-eyed through one of Jodoworsky’s acid westerns. The band only get around to fullon, tear-the-roof-off hard-rock action on a couple of tracks – the Iggy-meets-The Cramps primitive pound of I Wanna Lose, and the garage-punk motorik mash-up True Believers – but the album still manages to weave a dark and engaging spell. Motorcycle Boy (sadly not about the unsung Sunset Strip glamsters) is a highlight, a spiralling bummer-psych jammer that sounds like the Shangri-Las after a fistful of downers, as is the surprisingly accessible Maybe The Weather, a sort of poppy, Mazzy Starry bit of wavy-gravy that would sound excellent if you were, say, glued to your couch of woe for the weekend or drowning in the bathtub. It’s mood music for people who have not been taking their prescriptions (all of us, I reckon), and it’s full of bruised beauty.
Sleazegrinder
The Texas Gentlemen
Floor It!!! NEW WEST
Glorious second album from 21st century’s answer to top sessioners the Wrecking Crew.
Don’t read too much into that southerner-than-thou name. This backing squad-turned-‘proper band’ owe more to Little Feat and The Band than to Skynyrd or the Allmans. We got a taste in 2017 with their debut, TX Jelly. The Gents threw everything they knew at it (weirdo psych, gold-dust harmonies, jazzy touches, piano boogies…), and what it lacked in coherence it made up for in character. On this confident, moreishly bittersweet second album they’ve redressed the balance and upped the ante.
Accordingly, Floor It!!! flits between dreamy psychedelia, West Coast warmth, funky rhythms, brass and swampy rock and soul – sometimes all within one song, like the early Steely Dan-esque Ain’t Nothin New. Elsewhere the heart-piercing strings of Train To Avesta add a Motown vibe, while nods to The Beatles pop up in the likes of Hard Rd. All of which carries a deliciously tight-but-loose quality that makes you feel that this album could’ve been thrown together by friends, who just happen to be shit-hot musicians.
Polly Glass
Chuck Prophet
The Land That Time Forgot YEP ROC
Righteous roots rock.
It’s not so much nostalgia that infuses The Land That Time Forgot, as a sense that the roots of today’s ills and woes are to be found in the past. Consequently, the corruption of innocence is what lies at it heart. So while High As Johnny Thunders imagines an alternative timeline where the New York Dolls still rock hard, the triptych of Paying My Respects To The Train, Nixonland and the grimly hilarious Get Off The Stage examines the decline of the US Republican party from the death of Lincoln to the White House’s current resident. Due to financial constraints, Chuck Prophet’s characteristic Americana is stripped down and intimate, and the effect is a tenderly produced album where it feels as if he’s in the room with you. The humanity is palpable throughout his lyrics and delivery, and the album avoids preaching in favour of insightful storytelling, good humour and warmth.
Julian Marszalek
Joe Bonamassa
A New Day Now PROVOGUE
JoBo’s debut album revisited.
In 2000, the Tom Dowd-produced, covers-strewn A New Day Yesterday introduced Joe Bonamassa as a thrusting yet derivative blues talent. Two decades on, Bonamassa has remixed, re-sung, re-titled and remastered that debut. He’s added three previously unheard demos, including a storming assault on Bob Dylan’s I Want You, produced by one of his first patrons, Steve Van Zandt. The question is, of course: why?
According to Bonamassa, it’s some kind of tribute to Dowd, who died in 2002, but he’s long swapped this overly reverential approach for superior, more innovative material. Still, was a pointer to better times ahead. Now being older and wiser, Bonamassa has brought new value:, while he sounds authoritative rather than hopeful on Al Kooper’s .
