TOTAL ISSUE

Although most of the members of Total Issue were coming from the jazz scene, the resulting music is more of a semi-hippie prog rock. Every musician play many instruments and they all participate vocally.

Les Marins is very noteworthy for its superb bass line and its Indian-influenced middle section. Porte Ouverte is the A-side's centrepiece with a slow start and a hesitant flute to boot, but once it kicks in, the mood is jazzy/spacey with wild lenghty solo and excellent interplay, but retaining a raw garage-like quality. Come Down has the same kind of climate than Crimson I Talk To The Wind, with the same flute. Over The Shadow is a crescendo piece, building up from a sole organ drone and finishing in a full sing-along track, with a searing guitar.

Opening the flipside is the lengthy Rustique with poor thunder duplication (we're far from Sab's eponymous track here) as an intro, but the track soon takes its cruising speed, past the narrative bit, and soars, creating some really aurally qualitative moments. Closing resurrection starts atypically on a heavy guitars (there arte three of them in the group), before digressing into a weird percussion/bass movement (there are five percussionists in the band), but ending very abruptly as if space on the vinyl was lacking. The remaining tracks sound pretty much like the first side of the album, with those typically optimistic and intimate songs, a pure product of the ideals of the era.

While I wouldn't call TI's sole album anything essential for the progheads, this is the kind of album that will create a pleasant surprise, or at best confirm the small magical moments that the very early 70's still had to offer, before the first oil crisis. Your call on this one, but most likely, until a Cd re-issue exists, this will remain obscure and the scarcity of the vinyl (but affordable) will complicate your hunt.