CONTRACTION

3,5 stars really!!!

This first album from Contraction is a direct evolution from one of the three angular vinyl albums of Quebec progressive music. Coming a year after the release of cornerstone album Dimension M from Frank Dervieux and a few months before his untimely death, most of the musicians had played on that album, and Dervieux himself, very sick, participated to this album. It is also the second of three prog albums to use the human ear as artwork after Floyd's Meddle and before MMEB's Roaring Silence. While this album is certainly full of delightful music, it is a bit of a side-track for progheads, their place on the Archives mostly secured by the follow-up album. You will recognize however that typical Quebec sound especially with the Christiane Robichaud vocals that will remind you of Monique Fauteux in Harmonium's Heptade albums a few years later. Drummer Denis Farmer is also to be found in Harmonium, later on. Stanley's guitar lines are somewhat jazzy but also a bit Duane Allman inspired and Laferriere's bass works are certainly the strong points, the whole thing underlined by the Lachapelle Fender Rhodes piano. Among the guest musicians are Dervieux and Seguin on congas.

As I said above , the music is not overwhelmingly progressive but still holds many excellent moments to please even the most demanding proghead , but while there are some sizzling guitar solos and some very intimate ambiances, the whole band never seems to manage to shift to the next gear and go on to bigger things. This will be for the next album.

As previews reviews have stated , this is not the album that would have gotten Contraction into PA's database. Indeed, having bought the LP and listened to it a number of times before I wrote this review, I had to come back & read their bio page and the other reviews to see just what was so prog about the group.

It's not before the 4th song (if you start from side 1 to side two) , Trois ou Quatre, that you get to a somewhat prog track. And even at that, it seems like a pale, kind of jazzy soft rock version of Pink Floyd's Great Gig. Although a buddy of mine joked that it sounded like music that you found on a soundtrack for a 70s porn film .

Pixieland comes across as a Steely Dan throwaway without the hired hand guitar virtuosos that the Dan employed on their albums.

Most of the rest , well ... if I may ... the best that I can say is to imagine Karen Carpenter fronting a 70s soft rock outfit with that era's mediocre jazz rock noodlings.

Interesting only as a document of the emerging RPQ scene, and for its' membership. And worth all of the $3 that I paid for it, if you take into account the $1 I got back in cash when I sold it back to Spin-It.