AIRCONDITIONING

The album starts with the menacing and erotic "It Happened Today", which is quite funny as a composition. I think that there is much better performance of this song available from the Beat Club films, where there the traditional rock'n'roll piano sections are played with much more sensual violin, and of course the band and it's front lady are fun to watch. "Stretch" is not very interesting track, being quite basic bluesy rock number with good but too short instrumental middle section. The two following tracks have more classical feeling in them with symphonically constructed segments, and also nice violin and piano tones. Especially "Screw" (?) has some quite deep and beautiful feelings loaded into it, and "Blind Man" is a bit more lighter song.

The first side of the original vinyl ends up to the band's classic track "Vivaldi", and this performance on this studio recording is yet best of which I have heard of it, being a real highlight. The filmed version of this song on "Masters from The Vaults" is ruined by in my opinion too far out experimentations, and the performance on the BBC live CD has some kind of Puss'n'Boots sail-past sequences, which didn't please me. There's also a short quotation of this tune in the end of the album, which is quite futile as a track but ties the album as a tighter record with causalities from the different bearings of its latitudes. Other goodies from the B-side of the album are "Hide and Seek" with quite powerful elements, the short but heavy instrumental "Rob One", and the melancholic contemplations on "Situations". "Propositions" is a powerful and hard track, but there are also much better version of it from the television recordings available, allowing the visual delights which no other group has yet maybe exceeded.

This opener of the little unbalanced but still very interesting and sympathetic career of Curved Air is surely worth of checking out. I think this band was nice entity as it had good and personal musicians in it, and though they sometimes went to banalities, they also managed to cook up nice art rock pies from lightly psychedelic, jazzy and folky rock elements for your dearest listening events. "When there are bold movements done, there are acceptable risks of overdoing it".