OFFERING

After the splendid Barefoot Boy, would Larry Coryell's troupes manage to follow it up as brilliantly with Offering?? Certainly LC didn't feel the need to change a winning team, so he also kept producer Weiss. With a semi-psych artwork, you'd guess this album would allow for looser themes, but actually, quite the opposite, this is a collection of much tighter tracks.

Sonically the album is fairly different (partly a production thing), and you "get" this right away in the album's longest track, Foreplay, which as the title indicates is only a warm up, with everyone getting a change to loosen up the fingers. Ruminations is somewhat more of a straighter jazz tune, but flirting constantly with dissonance, this is probably the album's hardest tune to play. The much easier Scotland I is more in the style of the previous BB or Nucleus-type of fusion.

The flipside starts on the drummer Wilkinson title track, a red-hot mid-tempo track taking the usual Bronson-Wilkinson Hendrix-trio, but with LC, Mandel and Markus up front, the mood is definitely fusion- esque and finishing up at 100 MPH. Great stuff. A rather solid change of pace with the ultra-slow Meditation track, which tends to bore the listener. The closing 8-mins Beggar's Chant is another pure beauty, a mid-tempo torrid blister on your speaker cones that will melt them down would the track last longer.

Although not quite as flawless as BB (which wasn't either due to a lengthy drum solo), Offering is an awesome album that every proghead should own.

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