ABOUT TIME

Alan Taylor was a British musician who became very popular in Italy with a band called The Casuals. I'm no expert on The Casuals, but at some point they relocated to Italy for an extended period, and Taylor was apparently spreading out into other projects. Enter Ping Pong. Not a lot of history about these guys, but they would release two albums before splitting up. This first one is not a bad slice of '60s pop-rock, and it does sport a groovy album cover. But while it may have been released in 1971 when RPI was starting to gel, this sounds way more like a mid-late 60s British affair than anything remotely Banco/PFM-ish. I'm not dissing this album. These guys are accomplished musicians who can seriously play, and it wouldn't surprise me if they were doing session work.

While some tracks are sunny 60s pop, others are steamier and injected with wild bits of flute and sax, and the flute excursions certainly bring early Tull to mind. About Time recalls period song structures and a style already covered by countless similar bands, but everything is pretty short and unrealized (at least for prog fans) to be all that fulfilling. The moment you really start getting into something, the song is basically over. As mentioned, this sounds much more British than Italian, and all of the vocals are in English and are of a merely average quality. My impression of this album was that if you drop the vocals, the music that remains would make awesome background music for a somewhat cheesy late-60s TV show, perhaps a campy spy show. That might be right up your alley, but I can't recommend it unless you are a fan of '60s pop-rock that, despite some jazzy and brief hard rock sections, is still not especially memorable to me. Certainly not bad, has its moments, but not in the same league as even something like the debut Yes album.