DEEP PURPLE IN ROCK

What an interesting album from these hard rocking Brits. The thing that struck me now is how heav it was. Often old hard rock bands can seem amusing when compared to the heights (or the lows) that heaviness has reached nowadays, but this, while hardly being a death metal aural barage is, to be quite frank, heavy.

One just has to hear the intro to 'speed King' to realise that. That minute or so of absolute chaos is truly monumental. This is probably the birth of speed metal (a heavy metal subgenre that Black Sabbath refrained from inventing). Then there is a discordant organ scale before plunging into a really fast rocker of excellent quality. Next is 'Bloodsucker', a bit of a riff-monster nothing incredible but a solid hard rock track to get us ready for the album's centrepiece. 'Child in Time'. Simply wow! The slow refined intro building up to those semi-orgasmic, semi-painful screams, and the guitar solo... incredible, so fast and inventive. Ritchie is a genius. Not to mention the keyboard solo: Lord is also a genius. This one ends in a chaotic climax. Mindblowing is the word to describe 'Child in Time'. 'Flight of the Rat' is a more up-beat song that always seems to remind me of Queen. I love this song and is great relief after the intensity of the last song. 'Into the Fire' follows and is another great hard rock song. 'Livin' Wreck' is also in this vein and is an early example of rock groups singing about groupies, before it went too far and a certain Australian band decided to write ALL(!) their songs about this subject. 'Hard Lovin' Man' is a good closer and ends with the same sort of chaos as the intro of 'Speed King'.

Also worth mentioning is the track 'Black Night', added onto the CD version of the album which is one of Purple's classic song, that was originally a single only release to accompany the album, as was common practice back then. This CD version also includes twelve other bonus tracks including several entitled 'Studio Chat' which are pointless but slightly amusing. Also there are remixes o album tracks and two unrleased tracks called 'Crying Free' and 'Jam Stew' which are both pretty decent. This CD also comes with an excellent booklet documenting the making of this album, which is extremely informative.

The whole package of this remastered edition with bonus tracks and booklets should be worth five stars, but as a principal I only take into account the music on the original album in my ratings, so I will place this a four star album, albeit a very high four stars.