THIRD

As with all truly progressive and groundbreaking albums, this album is hard to like or even rap your head around at first. This is one of those albums that you can listen to all day (I meen all day!) and it sounds better and better and better until you are completely entrenched in it. At first I did'nt get why people thought this album was so special. At face value the album is very simple and under produced. Its basically just a whole lot of Saxaphone and Fender Rhodes interplay, with a couple organ solos thrown in. But if you look deeper it is so much more. This brilliance of this album is the cohesion of players who are complete masters of there perspective instruements. This is not grandiose like "The Rotters Club". The other amazing thing about this album is how a simple saxaphone melody or organ swirl can get a point across so well. This album and all of the latter Canterbury bands completelly rejected traditional jazz, and in that sense were purer in there progressiveness as fusion players than Weather Report and Return to Forever. To new comers to Canterbury bands like Matching Mole, Soft Machine, and National Health, I would just like to urge them to give it time. At first you may be wondering why people think these bands and there land mark albums are so amazing, when all you here is dissonent, scattered, jazz noodling. But eventually, you will understand--they were reshaping jazz in there own image. These bands were able to make jazz rough and loose and irreverent- while at the same time giving it this odd- quirky beauty that is breathtaking if you can pick up on it. With their precise choices of keys, chord sequences, rythms and harmonic properties they were able to create a whole new language for jazz that was heavy and melencholic and witty and gorgeous in its indifference. That in a nutshell is why this album and all the great Canterbury albums are so so special. I have never felt so sure of a 5 star rating as I have on this album.