LOOK AT YOURSELF

Less than a year after the versatile and very good 'Salisbury', Uriah Heep released "Look at Yourself" (1971), their third album, one of the band's most solid and polished works, with a marked orientation towards heavy and raspy sounds, but without leaving aside enriching experimental nuances.

The album shows a great sense of cohesion and maturity right from the start with the frenetic and homonymous "Look at Yourself" and the rhythmic "I Wanna Be Free", hard rocking tracks that combine Mick Box's fiery riffs and awakened guitar solos that at times go a few decibels further, creating spaces for the still embryonic Heavy Metal, with the timeless sonorities of Ken Hensley's hammond protagonist, and are reaffirmed in the energetic "Tears in My Eyes", a raw road rockabilly very well coloured by Box's guitar wah wah and brief acoustic chords in between.

Without straying from the path traced by the hard rock roughness, "Look at Yourself" also incorporates elements of progressive rock to give a greater sound flow to their proposal, with the stupendous and growing "July Morning", which goes through introspective and intense atmospheres from the instrumental display of the duo Box/Hensley, the cosmic moog of the guest Manfred Mann and the powerful vocal flashes of David Byron, surely one of the best pieces on the album, and with the complex "Shadows of Grief", which after a fierce first half with the whole band in full swing, plunges into mysterious places with aromatic hints of Floydian 'Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun' and into an experimental and psychedelic denouement with Hensley's keyboards.

And after "What Should Be Done", a ballad that doesn't quite seem to fit with the unified feel of "Look at Yourself", the raw hardrock returns with the frenetic and concise development of "Love Machine", leading the album towards a punchy and forceful finale.

"Look at Yourself", despite its lesser impact in the mainstream than contemporary works by bands such as Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, is among the group of albums that helped define the basis of Heavy Metal.

4 stars

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