This starts with such a funk bomb! And if you want to know
what musical genius is, it is here: Steve Marriott funking James Brown’s Think with its comparable level of
explosive funk.
No surprises this is the best of an otherwise ‘new’ album,
recorded between 1974-75, but not released as the dissolved/reconvened band’s
ninth album, until now. But in lighting such a fire that isn’t sustained, it’s
a little dangerous. But what an initial burn!
Betty Wright’s Let Me
Be Your Lovemaker is a Free-esque riffer that works well, even in its
rather raw recording, followed next by a similar methodology with its Beatles’
cover Rain – a song as transformed as
rain turned to sleet.
This Ol’ World and the blues gravel of Midnight of My Life
are delights, the full impact of what was performed lost it seems to me in the
production distance of what we eventually hear – his vocal forced across left
and right as if only half-captured at that moment rather than a clichéd stereo-sound
split. The gospel-esque organ and chorus add succour to the elemental emotion
of Marriott’s singing.
Penultimate Charlene is an R&B chug of proper Small
Faces lineage, and closing on Think 2 is a wise book-end of mainly instrumental
embers wafted back to flame before it all died out.
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