SALISBURY

The Purplelian influences, among others, very present in Uriah Heep's debut album, the rudimentary and crushing 'Very 'Eavy... Very 'Umble' from 1970, continue to hover over their second album, 'Salisbury' (1971), with Mick Box's gritty guitar riffs and corresponding solos, the rough textures of Ken Hensley's analogue hammond keyboards and David Byron's powerful and expressive tenor voice, very similar to Ian Gillian's, although a little more uniform, in pieces immersed within the hard-rock spectrum such as the persistent intensity of 'Bird of Prey', the aggressive and rugged mid-tempo of 'Time to Live' and the overwhelming agility of 'High Priestess'.

But 'Salisbury' goes a few steps further, and adds nuances that give interesting tonalities to the work and somehow help build an identity of their own for Uriah Heep, with delicate pieces such as the baroque 'The Park' and its arpeggiated acoustic guitars over Byron's falsetto voice and the choral whispers of the rest of the band including a brief jazzy interlude, and the lilting 'Lady in Black', a refined folk melody sung by Hensley, who also gives it a notable touch of melancholy with the mellotrons.

And the really disruptive part comes with the extended 'Salisbury', a symphonic suite that departs from the general mood of the album and develops its own path from the profuse wind orchestration of arranger and musical composer John Fiddy, which contrasts with the rock structures and generates huge spaces for Hensley's virtuoso performance on keyboards and above all Box's with some splendid guitar improvisations in the last third of the song and prior to the epic and chaotic closing of one of the band's most progressive songs.

'Salisbury' is a pioneering work in the creation of a new direction in which the energetic structures of hard rock converge with the sophisticated elaborations of progressive rock, and the starting point for the most fertile stage of Uriah Heep.

4 stars

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