JOURNEY

Imagine you could mix music as you mix colours. Now imagine taking 1971 Hawkwind and mixing them to Joy Division: a difficult task? Well, just listen to "Time Captives" from this intriguing, surprising album and you'll surely know how it would sound. Arthur Brown was (and I think he still is) a man of intuition, and just by replacing a drum with a drum machine, and organs with maddening synths, he managed to create some of the most forward- looking music of his times, a sort of freak-out "Autobahn" or Peter Hammil sending signals directly from Alpha Centauri... The opener track, as I said, is something really unuseful in prog rock, starting as Kraftwerk's Radio-Activity and evolving in an obsessive and cosmic experience. 1980s King Crimson had certainly listened to the intricated guitar-synth spacey arabesques of "Triangles", while mellotrons and hard guitar riffs in "Gypsy" take us back in the proper decade (the 1970s); this song wouldn't sound out of place in any Berlin-era albums by David Bowie, also thanks to a passionate vocal performance, then, all of a sudden the drum machine seems to go crazy and drives us directly in an electronic ride, somewhere in between Can and Hawkwind. Brown's cabaret/rock opera attitude comes to the forefront in "Superficial Roadblocks", a song which could rival Van Der Graaf Generator without any risk (at least, you can say that Hammil didn't come out of nothing, but had in Brown a very good teacher). The following songs are, in my opinion, not so exciting and advantgard sounding as the previous ones; Brown gets a little closer to 1970s mainstream sound, still mantaining a very strong personal touch (and that drum machine that is a real stunt here). If "Conception" is nothing but a "Caribbean" attempt (which may remind of the final section in J.M.Jarre's Oxygene), "Spirit of Joy" can be seen as Arthur Brown's personal "Silver Machine", a very enjoyable tune. The album ends up with the 21st century hard rock of "Come alive", not a remarkable song, a bit too long, yet a good one with a strong bluesy attitude. I think my car radio will surely play this album on my first journey to Sirius...