You might remember that I wrote a piece about the Welsh band, MAN, a few months ago when I was still a newbie to their music. Since then I have received some mind-blowing MAN albums, bursting with their eclectic blend of West Coast psychedelia, hard rock, blues, progressive rock, funk, Beatlesy harmonies, and top notch jamming. These albums have been beautifully remastered with excellent bonus material and packaging and new liner notes from one of the MAN legends himself, guitarist/singer/songwriter, Deke Leonard. The most recent reissues include the three albums, Back Into The Future, Slow Motion and Maximum Darkness.
I’ve got to say that these MAN reissues have been in very heavy rotation in my iTunes and iPod for the last couple months. I have gone from a complete ignorance of this band, not even having heard of them before 2008, to being converted to an unmitigated MAN fan by mid-2008. Why is MAN such a horribly overlooked band, you might ask? I’m really not sure, but my guesses are a) perhaps mismanagement (a la Moby Grape) and b) lack of radio hits. At least the Grateful Dead had “Truckin’” and “Casey Jones” But this isn’t necessarily mainstream music here either. This is music for music’s sake. Here’s my completely-biased account of the most recent set of MAN albums that have just been re-released on England’s Esoteric Recordings this summer.
Click on through for the juicy details…
So here’s my review of a UFO Best-Of album that I did for Blog Critics magazine. Keep in mind, I only do positive reviews so if the album sucked, you wouldn’t see it here! It was fun to write about UFO since I missed out on them back in my budding hard rock days, which were filled with the sounds of AC/DC, Def Leppard, Iron Maiden, Motley Crue, etc. Dig…
Okay, is it cool to like 80′s Metal again? With the hugely triumphant return of David Lee Roth-era Van Halen to the old hair metal guys even having their very own 4-day Bonnaroo-like camping festival, Rocklahoma, in July, it seems like the scene is set for the 80′s Metal Gods to rise again. So you’ll definitely see a hasty repackaging of catalogs and best-ofs from bands like Ratt and Poison and Motley Crue and Dokken, and even new albums from some of these guys. Some will be be great and make us wonder why we ever stopped listening to them and some will be quite the opposite… as with any genre of music.
Then if you’re really searching, you’ll find a brilliant compilation of songs from a band whose music informed that whole genre; a band who actually had little to no success in the 80s, but whose sound you could find all over the popular hard rock music of the decade. The band is UFO and the new compilation is Chrysalis Records’ The Best of UFO (1974-1983).
Now, as the band was coming to the end of their powers in 1983, I was turning 11-years old and beginning to be turned on to hard rock and metal. So I had definitely heard the name Michael Schenker since the Scorpions were just starting to see huge success in the States, as I was eating up their Animal Magnetism, Blackout and Love At First Sting albums, and knew that Scorps guitarist Rudy Schenker had a brother who was once in the Scorpions in the 70s and currently had his own creatively-named Michael Schenker Group. But I had not properly been introduced to the work of Michael Schenker in UFO until the last couple years. That’s pretty damn late for a band that formed in 1969 and who started hitting their creative stride in 1974, when I was 2-years old!
Over the past year, I’ve slowly been acquiring classic UFO albums and digging further into their catalog and just now, somewhat serendipitously, I was called upon to review the new Best Of UFO (1974-1983) collection, as it saw its April 2008 release.
I was happy to hear a great sequencing of songs when I first popped on the album, and a pristine remastering job! The comp kicks off with the 6 1/2-minute scorcher, “Rock Bottom”, from the time when the band lost their trippy space rock sound of old (another era of UFO I like a lot for different reasons) and picked up the aforementioned German guitar guru, Michael Schenker who gave them a more straight-ahead rock sound for their 1974 Shenker-debut album, Phenomenon. If this song doesn’t hook you, then you may want to check your pulse, for perhaps you’ve expired!
So I’ve had one of my Best Band features published elsewhere on this here web which extends the whole world wide. The site is called Blog Critics and I’ll be regularly writing pieces for them, but for now I just have one lonely little unpopular piece about a band that the general public doesn’t know sitting over there wishing it would get some clicks. So do it (and me) a favor and click on over there and give ‘er a read and better still, leave some glowing comments!
