CHILD IN TIME

First album after separation of Ian with Purple, CIT is certainly one of those "transition" album, Ian not really knowing what he's willing to do, except maybe capitalizing on his finest hour with Purple. Despite a really tacky artwork evoking the Purple epic and Ian making a cover of it, the rest of the album is mostly ?In some ways, Ian built his group rather intelligently, using veterans who certainly know their crafts and chops. With ex-Quartermass Gustafson on bass, old hand Ray Fenwick on guitar, old Purple pal Roger Glover on production and added instruments and good drumming from Nauseef?.. his group is not exactly tenderfoot boys, except for maybe Mike Moran (most likely not Gayle's brother) that will get the boot after this album.

Opening on a Purplish Lay Me Down that prefigures most of the first side: five short songs that resemble it and absolutely nothing interesting , especially on the lyrics' side, but musically this is quite deceiving as well, mostly due to poor songwriting The flipside carries only two songs including a cover of the Purple epic Child In Time, and while I can't ever imagine a better version of this than the original studio (the live versions were never as good), IGB manage to give this track another life, even if not nearly as thrilling as the original., but just going by once, instead of twice in Purple, thus shortening the song by around four to five minutes. It may sound awkward saying this, but on this album, the track that sounds less Purplish is precisely the Purple cover. The closing almost 12-minutes Let It Slide starts like a spacey, where the multi-layered tracks were probably not the best solution,

Gillan's first album seems a bit schizophrenic with the two sides (or facets) of the album being radically at odds, the first containing uninteresting but tight songs, while its opposite plays on a much more relaxed but also much worthier (for progheads anyway) duo of tracks, but certainly not enough to make this album worthy of your shelves. .