PILGRIMAGE

Pretty enjoyable album of passable boogie rock and more ambitious largely instrumental workouts and it's on the latter that the band score highest. The opener Vas Dis is great fun, relying on some fiery drumming and scat vocals to drive it along. The following track is, for me, the highlight, however. The Pilgrim starts with a mellow, almost ambient opening section before giving way to a driving, almost krautrock, guitar-driven riff-fest. It's metronomic, seemingly repetitive but constantly evolving figures are utterly involving and played with verve, elan and determination. It's a stunning track and the best is brought out of it by Martin Birch. Indeed, the prioduction throughout it great. The following Jailbait is a pleasant enough slice of bar-room boogie but it fails to match the ambition of the previous two songs. Alone, Lullaby and Valediction again suggest that the band were absorbing influences well beyond the blues boom jams that characterise Jailbait and the album's final live track but whilst those are fun in an obvious way, they can't compare with more illustrious rivals in that field (Wishbone Ash versus The Allman Brothers = no contest), so it's hard to understand why they didn't relentlessly pursue the kind of inventiveness and signature sound of material like The Pilgrim. They did so on Argus but often slipped back to old formulae which let them down in the end. Buy it for the almost title track alone. It's awesome.