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LEAVE IT OPENGongCanterbury Scene3.05 | 83 ratings |
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fuxi
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Prog Reviewer |
I feel somewhat ambivalent about this album. On the one hand, merely hearing Pierre Moerlen's clean and
steady beat gives me pleasure. Through overdubbing, Moerlen puts acoustic and electric vibraphones on
top, and those, too, sound very pure. The problem is: you keep waiting for exciting developments in his band's
music, and there are virtually none. Okay, there are some tiny little guitar solos, and a few brief
but riveting moments on what sounds like a xylophone, but when you compare LEAVE IT OPEN to
GAZEUSE or ESPRESSO II (where there's so much going on you can hardly follow!) it just seems a sad, sad
story. I wonder if Moerlen had been touring a little too much with Mike Oldfield. From INCANTATIONS
onwards, Oldfield's minimalist-derived themes were getting more and more insipid, and now Gong has started suffering from the same disease. Some critics call LEAVE IT OPEN meditative and
relaxing, but I find it discouraging and enervating, particularly when there's some sort of dreamy little
keyboard humming in the background and Charlie Mariano gets to play insipid little solos on his sax. (Shame on
you, Charlie, we KNOW you could do much better!) Is this really chill-out music avant-la-lettre? Surely only if you're in a second-rate shopping mall elevator, with the air conditioning going crazy!
Conclusion: all those who enjoy inventive jazz-rock (Bruford, Mahavishnu, Metheny) and/or
mallet percussion virtuosi (Gary Burton, Joe Locke), stay away! But if you absolutely need to buy this, you can still
get it as part of an inexpensive 2-disc set entitled THE ARISTA YEARS, which also includes the equally
dire TIME IS THE KEY and the far better PIERRE MOERLEN'S GONG LIVE, which at least has some decent
guest spots, from the likes of Mike Oldfield and Didier Malherbe.
To his credit, Pierre Moerlen actually regained some chops in 2002, when his version of Gong made a triumphant (if short-lived) comeback with PENTANINE.
fuxi |
1/5 |
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