STORMCOCK

As a long time Harper fan, Stormcock is an incredibly frustrating album to me. It remains rooted, by Harper's own volition, in a purist folk asthetic that Harper was dead set against abandoning at that time, and I feel the album suffers because of it.

Harper is indeed the uncompromising artist that was so revered by Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, as the album predominately features just Harper's acoustic guitar and (multi tracked) vocals. However, I feel that it's exactly this lack of compromise that roots the album in obtuse Dylanesque lyrics (it difficult for the uninitiated to realize that the song The Same Old Rock is about the evils of organized religion) and a monotonous feeling of sameness. Dare I say it, the man just takes himself too seriously on this outing. The gravitas of this material threatens to pull Stormcock under due to it's shear weight. It's far from a cathartic listening experience because Harper, for example, is focused on telling how bad the world is to a returning soldier, in the song One Man Rock And Roll Band, without ever offering constructive solutions.

Taken within the context of other albums released in 1971 such as Aqualung and Fragile, Stormcock was viewed as an eccentric folk album with "heavy" lyrics, no matter how indecipherable that they were at times. But its shear scope helped to render the album a classic by many.

It's evident to me that Harper was haunted by the ghosts of his contemporaries, such as Bert Jansch and John Renbourn, of whom he shared a residence in the popular Soho folk club Les Cousins, along with the afore noted Mr. Dylan, who gave up obtuse topical lyric writing some 4-5 years earlier, and that any flight of rock fancy added to Stormcock's music would have simply been an unforgivable act of folk purist betrayal.

It's only guest guitarist Jimmy Page and arranger David Bedford that adds much needed variety and drama to the album and rescues it from it's narcoleptic daze. Page, first, with his stunning coda and guitar interplay with Harper on The Same Old Rock, and then Bedford, by turning album closer Me And My Woman into a stunning finale by injecting the song with a deft mixture of baroque and avant-garde orchestrations that gave this song a cinematic scope that's absent on the opening track Hors d'Oeuvres and the afore mentioned One Man Rock And Roll Band. Unfortunately, Harper became fixated on his ability to vocalize in a wailing falsetto at times in the wrong musical key, particularly in overdubbed backing harmonies, a trait he picked up while recording the Folkjokeopus album a few years earlier and is just as unwelcome this time. Thankfully, this was the last time Harper did so on record.

The fact these four lengthy and incredibly plodding songs (which make up the album) have an immediate tendency to overstay their welcome is another sign that monotony permeates Stormcock.

Stormcock is an iconic album in the Progressive Rock canon, but one that is certainly cut out for specific listeners. 3 stars.