David Hillyard and the Rocksteady 7's latest offering starts off
with the rather prophetic quote "All revolutions happen twice - once as
tragedy and once as farce". Hmmm...
The album's opening track, and what is effectively the title track,
Song Of The United Front, is quite different to the other tracks in
that is seems to be more structured and less free-form than the rest of
the album. In fact, by the third track, Baby, I could have sworn that
it had turned into a jazz record before it slowly roped itself in
towards the end of it's run. Given that I'm really not a fan of jazz,
this album did prove to be quite hard to work through at times,
especially as I didn't expect it to be. Far East proves to be a rather
torturous affair of the epic variety (it comes in at 10 minutes). To be
honest, there were times I thought "this record would be alright if it
wasn't for those damn horns!" Now I realise the ludicrous nature of
that statement given the band, but unstructured (oh, sorry, I mean
"free-form") jazz just grates on my nerves before too long.
Come And Get Me is far closer to what I was expecting from David
Hillyard and the Rocksteady 7, whether that be naïve or not. Another
You has become one of my favourites off this record and is also the
only song on the album with vocals (provided by Rocksteady 7 member
Larry McDonald).
My only other gripe with this record was caused by reading David's
liner notes. He has some "interesting" views. What got my goat with
this, though, was his political rantings. Personally, I prefer
politics to be kept as far out of music as possible (probably because I
have no interest in politics, generally speaking). In the interest of
not getting on my high horse, I'll leave my comment at that.
There are some great moments on United Front and, given the fact
that they are an instrumental band, is perfect summer background music
for parties, long drives, etc.
- reviewed by Dominique -
