DEEP PURPLE

When I listen to this album, I realize that there were many bands at that time that were doing something similar. Roughly the same mix of heavy rhythm and blues, psychedelia and the search for new musical forms can be heard in the debut album of Yes, which was released in the same year, or in The Thoughts of Emerlist Davjack by The Nice, and even in Pink Floyd's Saucerful of Secrets, which were released a year earlier. This list of analogies can be continued for a very long time. In all of these albums, bold musical experiments are combined with simple, almost pop songs, and this is the difference between many albums recorded in the 60s. Certainly, in that decade, the bands sounded more similar to each other, while maintaining their originality. Such a contradictory feeling.

Yes, "musical nazis" still remember Deep Purple's first four albums, recorded in the pre-hard rock era. Although I have heard the opinion more than once that the most interesting music was created by DP Mark 1. However, opinions regarding different forms of art are always subjective. We will never know what kind of music the group would have performed further if it had not been influenced by the debut albums of Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath. But I suppose that this album can partially answer this question. The song Blind with a gorgeous part of either piano or harpsichord, and especially April with its innovative for that time combination of rock and classical music are very close to progressive rock (Concerto for Group and Orchestra is even closer, it must be admitted that even the founders of progressive at that time did not think of the idea of ​​recording with a symphony orchestra!) I think Deep Purple could well have become another trendsetter of progressive rock, and perhaps then this genre would have looked somewhat different. Heaven knows... Jon Lord's musical preferences and Ritchie Blackmore's undoubted talent were a great launching pad to take the band in a prog-rock direction. Or in some other direction. But we all know what happened a year later, and what path the band eventually took.

But this album remains one of the most interesting in the 60s for me. It sums up the first stage of the band's work and, together with the neoclassical composition of the same name, is a wonderful finale for it.