WONDERWORLD

Increasingly melodic and distancing themselves from the harsh sonorities of rough and raw rock, with Ken Hensley playing an almost exclusive role in the composition of the songs, Uriah Heep deepened the tendency to make their approach more accessible with the release of "Wonderworld" (1974), their seventh album.

After a promising start with Hensley's moog and David Byron's plethoric voice in the moving "Wonderworld", the album is a hard rock of common places, lacking in explosiveness and fantasy, even though at least some doses of agility and a certain aggressiveness appear in Mick Box's guitar riffs in "Suicidal Man", in the rushing rhythm of "So Tired" and the boogie joy of "Something or Nothing", but not in the bland "The Shadow and the Wind" and Byron's excessive histrionics, the dreary "We Got We", and least of all in the inoffensive and mellow orchestrated ballad "The Easy Road".

The final section raises the level with the bluesy half-time of "I Won't Mind" and the guitar display of the always diligent Mick Box accompanied by the great bass of Gary Thain, and with the interesting approach to space rock in the conclusive "Dreams", surely among the best moments of the album.

Once "Wonderworld" was finished and showing signs of exhaustion due to the frenetic rhythm of releases and tours, the most stable of the Uriah Heep line-up (four albums in a row with the same musicians), began to dismember with the dismissal of Thain (who unfortunately died a year later from a heroin overdose), replaced by John Wetton (King Crimson/Asia, etc.) for the two subsequent albums.

3 stars

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