Free - Tons of Sobs
Free s/t
It’s been something of a busy couple of weeks, so I haven’t been doing a lot of listening, certainly no active, attentive listening, in fact I have to reach back a little farther to remember something I did listen to, the first two albums by the bluesy rock group Free, something of a precursor to (and much more enjoyable than) Bad Company. For me both of these albums are period music, accessible and psych-informed rock with some longer solo segments, but mostly a vehicle for the vocals. Some of these songs I recognize from pop radio but for the most part, I was just surprised I hadn’t heard the albums in full yet as they were quite good.
Outer Limits - Outermania
For my ears (and eyes in this case), Outer Limits are a band who has created some really nice presentations, but always seem to fall short in the musical department. They’ve recently reformed and did so without their original and long standing vocalist, which is nothing but a bonus as far as I’m concerned, as his voice was always the weakest element. Instrumentally this is a group who can do some rather nice violin-fronted symphonic rock, in fact A Scene of Pale Blue might be one of the better albums in the genre from the 80s (if it weren’t so twee at times), although the band’s development seemed arrested at this point in that it seemed they were cut off at just about their peak (there was a culminating live album I’m not counting here). A few years later, they released this early demos album, which (iirc) I reviewed for Expose years back, and in listening to it again I was reminded of all the things I didn’t really like about Outer Limits, starting with the awfully enunciated English vocals and utterly banal melodies. Most of this seems like demos for their debut album Misty Moon and if you already have that, you probably won’t need Outermania. Later, I saw a video of a live recording of the band post break up that was really impressive, very much the big jump in quality that happened to Kenso and Gerard at one point, so I’m actually thinking of checking the new album out, despite the fact that not an album in their catalog would break an 8 on my watch.