SIX

The entrance of the multi-talented Karl Jenkins into the cushy apparatus was quite a big deal. Like the pied piper, (except replace the flute for an oboe) he brought with him melodic ideas of all sorts and especially riffs into a band that had abandoned structured playing for all sorts of nasty, all-over-the-place free jazz wankery. By welcoming in a shiny new jazz fusion style of composing the Machine's pieces, (Hah, nifty pun, eh?) Jenkins single-handedly salvages the band's listenabillity and my relative respect for the post-Third Soft Machine.

Hey but don't think for a second that this is the crowning achievement of the Softs, no ma'am-eree, just like this album's successor, "Seven", a lot of the musical passages on here tread the thin French mustache between hypnotic and the kind that will knock you comatose if you're not careful. Soft Machine sacrifices its previous demon - foolhardily and obnoxious sax tweedling - and conjures a new one: BOREDOM. However, I just might not be the biggest fanboy of fusion music that doesn't kick me in the face and show me who's the boss because this is a bunch of unobtrusive, unassuming background music that can be quite soothing at times, not to mention it's miles above "Fourth" and "Fifth" which downright annoy me.

Okay, historically this is a double album but thanks to magic of technology we get all eighty something minutes of music burned on a handy dandy disk. Originally, the two LPs were divided into a live and studio album and I tend to view them as they were intended for fear that my life will be entirely sucked out if I listen to the full eighty minutes. Basically, both albums are about equal in terms of musical accomplishment but I tend to prefer the studio one because it's much more diverse and becalming with it's dabbling in the ambient direction Brian Eno would be headed in a few years.

Hearing the band live isn't quite the revelation I imagined it would be due to the relative lack of energy amongst all the players. I love how the first track- "Fanfare" sounds like it's the introduction to something a lot more pompous and proggy (Like a Van Der Graaf Generator album or something) but than the rest is just a bunch pleasant oboe and keyboard noodlings underpinned by some good, Hugh Hopper trademark bass riffs.

The pieces that stand out in the slightest include the highly krautrock influenced, "Gesolreut", "Riff", an inspired bass/keyboard riffage piece, and a furious retooled version of "All White" from Fifth. Low points include "5 from 13" (With Love and Thanks to Phil's Seamen) a five minute drum solo which is painfully boring considering drums have no melody and when they stop playing rhythms they become a bunch of idiotic pounding, especially when played in that super fast free style thing that jazz drummers do.

But in the studio, the band is somehow granted a lot more space to stretch out. Each band member pens something that goes over 7 minutes. "The Soft Weed Factor" is my favorite of the bunch. This is one of the few cases where the Machine manages to produce sounds that exactly mesmerize me into an ambient trance rather than bore me to tears. This song is eleven minutes of repetitive keyboard loops but they keep adding new musical ideas to the sonic background so it never really gets boring, only entrancing. "Chloe and the Pirates" is (believe me or don't) easy listening jazz music with psychedelic and classical influences and features a whole nine minutes of quelling oboe doodles with a few beautiful themes here and there. Hopper's "1983", is simply a bunch of spooky Gothic piano lines and a scary keyboard belching sound for seven minutes. Good golly gosh, I have no idea if it's good or bad but at least, it's completely at odds with the rest of material on here and answers my plea for some dang diversity on an album that's otherwise as rigorous as jazz fusion gets.

In the end, this album makes for some grade A background music but nets itself a C+ for conscious listening music. I can barely focus for more than three compositions at a time without getting distracted or zoning out, kind of like the stuff on this album's successor, "Seven". In fact, if you really dig the style of "Seven", BUY THIS BUGGER AT ALL COSTS. They're virtually indistinguishable and almost make a triple album because "Seven is just a continuation of this. Yawn.... all this noodling is making me sleepy, if nothing buy this for a remedy for insomnia.

Album Grade: C+