MACHINE HEAD

Ritchie Blackmore and Ian Gillan, two complex personalities who permanently argued to impose their points of view on the musical direction of Deep Purple, with eventual interventions by the less belligerent Jon Lord, who also showed his interest in adding classical music elements to the purple proposal, paradoxically ended up generating the fundamental energetic spark for the creation of "Machine Head" (1972), the fifth album by the British band and one of the stellar works in the history of rock.

Lord's lush Hammonds and Blackmore's baroque-scented guitar solo on the thundering "Highway Star", the immortal, universal riffs of the timeless "Smoke on the Water" (which describes the cinematic fire that occurred during Frank Zappa and his band's performance at the Mountreux Casino Theatre on the shores of Lake Geneva, the very place Deep Purple chose to record "Machine Head"), Lord and Blackmore's virtuosic display on the robust blues rock "Lazy", and the thick riffs on the fantastical, galactic "Space Truckin'" with Gillan's vocal wailing, are carved into the foundations of hard rock and incipient heavy metal, and immortalised on the legendary live double "Made in Japan" released months later.

Just below the famous tetralogy, there is the mid-tempo bluesy riff of "Maybe I'm a Leo" and the determined and unstoppable keyboards of the vertiginous "Pictures of Home"' with a similar structure to "Highway Star"; And if the excellent and melancholic ballad "When a Blind Man Cries" (B-side of the simple and correct funky single "Never Before") had not been left out, partly because of the technical limitations of the vinyl and partly because Blackmore was not convinced by the song, the album would have been even more rounded.

The stupendous "Machine Head", which reached the first place in the music charts in the UK and several European countries, and in the top ten of the US Billboard with around 3 million copies sold, is an obligatory reference and source of inspiration for countless bands that emerged in the following years (Def Leppard, Iron Maiden, Metallica, and Alice in Chains, among others).

Essential

4.5 stars

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