FIREBALL

This was my first record by Deep Purple that I purchased. Fireball is in my opinion one of the four essential Deep Purple albums, but this is still the biggest service to their hard rock section of their catalog I've heard from them yet. Now, to act like this album is bad would be a disservice to the greatness of Deep Purple. Deep Purple in the late '60s/early 70's were in a league of their own. They always gave us some of the best material you could find in hard rock at the time, and perhaps only Led Zeppelin came close to their quality, and in my opinion completely topped them. My point is that even their worst material up to this point was still good, and that's including this album, Fireball.

There isn't really anything about Fireball that I can say I dislike. This album is a consistently fun early hard rock album that is so full of decent tracks that you can really see why this has its status of being one of Deep Purple's classics. And with the undeniably great title track, which is certainly an essential Deep Purple song, my hopes for this album .

I need to make it clear that there aren't any 'bad' tracks on here. All are pretty good. But I just feel like none of them really surpass 'pretty good'. Like, there's the title track which is an undeniable classic, but other than that, what is there to make this a 'great' album? Well, Fools is a pretty good track, I'll give it that. And The Mule has a memorable instrumental which may rival some of the best from their previous albums, but as a whole that song doesn't really become one of the best Deep Purple had to offer. And that's where this album suffers a lot: no track is bad, per se, but no track ever reaches the heights that they set the bar with, both in the title track and in previous outings. There are some tracks that I liked a lot, such as Fools and No One Came, but even taking those into consideration I wouldn't mind just forgetting this album's existence. I could honestly just see myself putting the title track on a playlist of my favorite songs and never returning to the full project again, because although some songs are good, none of them are noteworthy.

Then there's Anyone's Daughter, and I really don't know what went wrong there. It's a track that has a really uncharacteristic country blues feel to it, telling a "humorous" story of a farmers daughter, and while it ain't awful, it really isn't a good track at all. Maybe it's just that I have never cared for the country genre, but it bored me more than anything. For a song that has gotten fame for being funny, it didn't entertain me at all. Even Blackmore's guitar work, which more times than not makes the songs as great as they are, didn't do enough to save the track. There's also the sluggish No No No, which I have to admit I enjoyed, but it is far too long. For a song that's nearly seven minutes long, it doesn't do nearly enough to justify it being as long as it is. Four-to-five minutes long? Maybe that would work. But just under seven would have worked in my opinion some songs drag.

I realize that I've done a lot more complaining on this album than praising, and honestly it's deserved. For a band who has done nothing but good releases up to this point, this album is a huge uplift , but it was expected sooner or later. I don't think this is a bad album. I don't dislike it in the slightest. However, I would not recommend this to new Deep purple fans I would start with "shades of deep Purple" or "In rock" I've been waiting to review this album its great hard rock album. 4 stars

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