| Track: | Rating: | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. I Only Want My Love To Grow In You | | | | ||
| 2. Turn Me Round | | | | ||
| 3. Hard, Hard Winter | | | | ||
| 4. My Friend Peter | | | |||
| 5. The Soldier's Tale | | | | | |
| 6. Simple Visions | | | | | |
| 7. Charmer | | | | ||
| 8. (Wasting My Time) Thinking Of You | | | | ||
| 9. Beside The Rio Grande | | | | | |
| 10. So Close And Yet So Far Away | | | |||
All tracks by David Cousins & Chas Cronk except "Hard, Hard Winter" by David Cousins & Robert Kirby, and "Beside The Rio Grande" and "So Close And Yet So Far Away" by David Cousins.
Although best known for having housed Rick Wakeman prior to his rise to stardom within Yes, the Strawbs have a fairly extensive history of their own. Their brand of folk-prog may have never reached the heights of other bands of the era (artistically or commercially), but they were able to carve out a fairly deep niche for themselves on the outskirts of the progressive genre.
It is generally agreed upon that their "peak" occurred between 1971 and 1974 (as per most other progressive bands, actually). Hero And Heroine (1974) is regarded by some as a minor classic of the field, and the Wakeman-era Strawbs albums remain popular with some diehards to this day.
Most would claim that Nomadness (1975) marked the beginning of the group's downturn. Although The Strawbs had never shunned more mainstream stylings entirely (check out "Sad Young Man" on the Hero And Heroine album), such influences came more to the foreground in this release. It could be argued that their credibility never really recovered from this; their momentum, at least, was curtailed.
Their next album, Deep Cuts (1976) suggests nothing so much as a band profoundly uncertain of its next direction. The band runs through a vast array of variants on their normal style on this album, resulting in tracks of vastly uneven quality. The best material suggests that their ability to transfer "epic" folk themes to progressive music remained strong; the worst suggests that they were running out of ideas for such themes and didn't have much else of substance to offer.
The album's journey begins on a mediocre note with "I Only Want My Love To Grow In You", where some decent music is wasted on a fairly prosaic song. The lyrics never expand beyond a fairly banal theme of `love meant to last through the years', and don't offer any interesting sentiments within this theme. Cousins's vocals are sub-standard here as well, and the structure of the song suggests strict conformity with the limits commonly expected for such material. Some credit is to be given to Lambert's electric guitar lines, but the song itself doesn't quite seem to deserve these. Not the most promising of beginnings, to say the least.
"Turn Me Round" begins with a "Won't Get Fooled Again"-type riff, and develops into a number which is paradoxically better than the first track but featuring weaker playing. The lyrics are generally better here than before, featuring moments of Tull-esque cleverness (not necessarily double entendres) in its take on romantic dedication; some semi-proggy soloing occurs between the verses as well. As against this, there are some extremely stupid moments within the song as well -- mostly resulting from Cousins's seeming desire to rake in a few heavy fans with a bit of vocal caterwauling on the side. The New Wave Of British Heavy Metal lurks on the margins of this track, and it ultimately ends up ruining a song with some decent potential.
"Hard, Hard Winter" is a decent-if-unspectacular lyrical ballad, with Cousins's vocals and lyrics finally managing to achieve a state of shared balance. As a proggy folk number, it works fairly well -- the lyrics are actually fairly impressive for the most part, and the music is good enough to sustain the track.
This leads to "My Friend Peter". Leaving aside the musical value of this track for a moment, the following must be said: whenever Tory songwriters band together to whine about school bills, taxes, labour disputes and domineering wives, and in so doing invent a "honest, upstanding citizen" type (Peter, in this case) who is eventually worn down by these matters and driven to suicide, it can't help but bring down the value of the work somewhat. Chamber-of-Commerce lines like "He was a generous man with a heart of gold" are offered up in support of this martyr, seemingly without a trace of irony. I'd like to think that this is a parody, but it seems rather unlikely. And the music isn't very good in any case -- fairly ordinary blues-prog that matches the misguided conviction of the lyric just about perfectly. This is the sort of track that should have the listener running back to Henry Cow or Robert Wyatt in a matter of seconds.
Things can't help but improve after that, and "The Soldier's Tale" is something entirely different. Perhaps unconsciously sensing his limitations, Cousins turns away from present disputes to those of the past, in order to offer up more general assessments of ongoing difficulties (shades of "The Hangman And The Papist", perhaps). Written about one of the Jacobite Rebellions (it isn't entirely clear which one), the lyric shifts between the two sides and eventually comes to a detached conclusion which, if somewhat less than profound, is at least a step back from the right-wing sentiments of the previous number. It's also, beyond question, the most interesting musical number on the first side -- acoustic guitars and progressive song structures match extremely well, as the band finally achieves a truly successful "folk-prog" mix. If only more of the songs could have been like this ...
"Simple Visions" begins as a fairly ordinary folk/classic-rock number, and sounds vaguely like Triumph in the first chorus ... but, surprisingly, it improves as the track develops. The guitar line towards the end of the track is actually quite impressive, and the bass and piano parts have decent qualities as well. The lyrics aren't anything terribly special, but their inoffensive enough so as not to intervene with the rest of the track.
"Charmer" is another step downwards. The slightly bluesy pop-prog nature of this track isn't that spectacular to begin with, and the Queen-esque vocal harmonies either aren't done properly or simply don't fit the song as a whole. And no matter how much Cousins & Cronk might have thought that a line like "You're underage and underrated" was a stroke of cleverness, it would seem that they were mistaken. While a minor time change in the track might count for something, this one can be discarded fairly easily.
"(Wasting My Time) Thinking Of You" is a deliberate attempt at creating an "oldstyle" folk number, and works fairly well as such. The instrumentation and mixing are managed in a deliberately outdated manner (sounding akin to something from the 1930s or so). It's not a stellar track, but it works fairly well in context.
"Beside The Rio Grande" is the closest that the album comes to having an "epic", though at a length of under five minutes, some might wonder if such a term is really appropriate. Still, the grandeur of the opening mellotron strings and the beckoning acoustic guitar line suggests that something of a more substantial nature is about to unfold. What follows is a rather disturbing tale of a preacher intruding upon "frontier" territory beside (where else?) the Rio Grande -- with charisma and a guest country band, he quickly attains strong levels of support from the local community (causing the local authorities to become worried, especially when said preacher takes aim at the existing law). After overturning several dice and card tables in a local gaming house, the local cowboys brutally torture and murder him; with his dying breath, the preacher calls for their forgiveness. It seems fairly obvious that there are no heroes in this number, though the portrayals of rival forms of social corruption and manipulation makes for an interesting study, at least. Cousins, interestingly, sings from the perspective of one of the cowboys. The music adds to the mysterious quality of the story, making this the best track on the album. It wouldn't be going too far to say that the album should have ended here, I think.
Instead, the listener must bear through "So Close And Yet So Far Away", a tedious ballad featuring bad singing, Hallmark-style lyrics, and music which seems designed so as not to make a powerful impact on the listener. The guitar solo at the end doesn't really help; about the only interesting aspect of this track is that the keys sound slightly like Rick Wakeman at times.
In sum, Deep Cuts is an extremely mixed bag. While it isn't a total disaster, there simply isn't enough good material to make this one of the Strawbs's better releases -- their earlier work (especially Hero And Heroine) would be a better place for a newcomer to start. Perhaps the better parts of Nomadness and Deep Cuts would have made a decent single album, but it's far too late for such speculation now.
(review originally posted to alt.music.yes on 10 April 1998)