BRIEFLY

Rip It Up, Issue 27, 1 October 1979, Page 16

BRIEFLY

By George Kay and Ken Williams

Larry Carlton. Mr 335 Live in Japan (Warner Bros) This is that rarity an album with a former session man as leader that isn’t weighted down by tedious technicality while being essentially devoid of personality. On the contrary, Larry Carlton soars. He has the rare ability to make music that is at once impeccable and fiery. Carlton's guitar is the centrepiece and the pacesetter, but there’s ample room for some sizzling playing by the rest of the quintet, especially keyboards man Greg Mathieson. Mr 335 Live in Japan more than fulfils the promise of Carlton’s immaculate, economical session work for as the Crusaders, Steely Dan, Michael Franks and Joni Mitchell. He also displays a pleasant singing voice (reminiscent of Elvin Bishop) on "I'm a Fool” K. W. Mallard, In A Different Climate (Virgin) Mallard sprang from Captain Beefheart’s legendary Magic Band when he left them for further musical liasons with Frank Zappa in 1975. Bill Harkerload (guitar) and Mark Boston (bass) were in the Magic Band for six years and as you’d expect Mallard are high on instrumental attainment.

The album, originally released in Britain in 1976, is certainly an accomplished jazz tinged country-rock foray with the bonus, I suppose, of vocalist Sam Galpin sounding like a Joe Cocker understudy. Pick of the crop would be "Your Face On Someone Else” and "Mama Squeeze” where the band slip and slide in fine Little Feat fashion. Old hat, but it has worn well. GK

Gary Brooker, No More Fear of Flying (Chrysalis) Procol Harum's old vocalist/song-writer and general all-round stalwart has gathered together a group of weathered session musicians (Renwick, Mattacks and Lynch) for this, his first of many threatened solo albums. Brooker is now writing with ex-King Crimson lyricist, Pete Sinfield, who, thankfully, has lost most of his gauche lyrical excesses. Surrounded by such safe talent Brooker sounds satisfied, almost complacent but he has at least dropped the doomy melodrama that plagued much of his work with Procol in favour of a smoother more commercial style. Carefully put together but the album founders on predictability and mediocrity. GK

The Amazing Rhythm Aces, The Amazing Rhythm Aces (CBS) If this album lacks the emotional depth of last year's Burning the Ballroom Down it more than compensates in warmth. The emotional crises that haunted Ballroom are not in evidence, replaced by a feeling of sunlit space.

New Aces member Duncan Cameron contributes an instant country classic in “Homestead in My Heart”, which has a backup vocal from Joan Baez, but the fulcrum of the group is Russell Smith. Few singers can inject a phrase with such heartbreak as Smith. He contributes fewer of his own songs this time around but his sensitive readings of Al Green’s “Love and Happiness” and New Orleans singer Benny Spellman’s "Lipstick Traces (on a Cigarette)" are worth the price of the album. Nobody since the early Band has created such an individual synthesis of the voices of the American heartland. K. W.

The Pop Group, Y (Radar) The Pop Group are from Bristol and they don’t play pop music. Their name is a deliberate irony of the fact that their music is the absolute antithesis of what pop music is and stands for.

The Pop Group are post-holocaust stridency, pretentious dissonance of the ilk that characterised the too-clever-for-its-own-damn-good Public Image album. Y plays with pain in a studio setting with the sound mixed to provide a hollow alien backdrop over which vocalist Mark Stewart screams "Don’t Call Me Pain” and “We Are Time”, the most accessible of the 'songs’ therein. University anguish, can anyone feel this bad?

Like Public Image, this album has an air of self-importance. Too conceited by half. GK

Bobby Darin, Sold Out (K-tel) The career of Bobby Darin blew with me wind. Starting as America's answer to Lonnie Donegan, he went on to write and perform light rockers (notably “Splish Splash” and "Dream Lover”) before becoming an ersatz Sinatra, later he modelled himself on Ray Charles and, later still, Tim Hardin before his early death in 1973.

This album covers Darin's middle period fo the late ’sos and early 60s. How ‘great’ these ‘2O greatest hits’ were is open to conjecture, but despite Darin's image shifts there is a surprising continuity. Many of the songs are delivered in a dated, finger-snapping nightclub style, but at best it is an interesting, though not arresting, portrait of a pop craftsman. K. W.

Fischer-Z, Word Salad (United Artists) If Leo Sayer went new wave then odds on he’d sound like Fischer-Z on their debut album, Word Salad.

The band, a four piece with keyboards, sprung a couple of years ago from various places around England and are propelled chiefly by one John Watts, ex-choirboy (and he sounds like it) and psychology graduate who now writes Fischer-Z’s inoffensive lightweight songs.

These guys are opportunists who have drawn nearly all of their ideas from other sources, particularly from XTC, but even then they have failed to produce anything of consequence. Their;best song, and it is good, is the white reggae toy keyboards sound of "Remember Russia” but it is still too polite, too tame. Pleasant but trivial. GK