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Traffic - Shoot Out At The Fantasy Factory CD (album) cover

SHOOT OUT AT THE FANTASY FACTORY

Traffic

 

Eclectic Prog

3.68 | 207 ratings

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patrickq
Prog Reviewer
2 stars I agree with what seems like the majority of fans here: after Traffic's John Barleycorn Must Die and The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys, Shoot Out at the Fantasy Factory is a letdown. As Robert Christgau and others have pointed out, the title of the final song ("(Sometimes I Feel So) Uninspired") is a hint as to the album's contents.

The album isn't a total loss, but from the end of the title song through the first four minutes of "Tragic Magic" is twenty-one minutes of blah. That's a lot of blah, by the way, on a thirty-nine-minute album. "Roll Right Stones" finds singer/multi-instrumentalist Steve Winwood and drummer Jim Capaldi - - who co-wrote most of the album - - trying to come up with a Traffic song, but settling for a meandering Grateful Dead track that at best might've been (literally) cut down by ten minutes* and put out as a b-side. Maybe the length of the track was symbolic of the thousands of years that the Rollright megaliths have existed.

"Evening Blue" is more of the same melding of British pop-folk and US pop-soul. It's rambling and a bit too casual for Traffic; neither Winwood's soulful voice nor Chris Wood's well-played saxophone stylings are enough to elevate this beyond the band's second- division pieces. And then Wood's instrumental "Tragic Magic" picks up where "Evening Blue" left off. The downtempo vibe of the prior seventeen minutes had been, to quote the Buckinghams, kind of a drag in places, and the first four minutes of "Tragic Magic" threatens to drag Shoot Out at the Fantasy Factory into simple tedium.

Thankfully, the second section of "Tragic Magic" is based on a nearly out-of-nowhere woodwind vamp that reminds me of Fela Kuti's 1970s work. It doesn't exactly fit with the rest of Shoot Out at the Fantasy Factory, but it's pretty great - - my only complaint is that this two-and-a-half-minute section wasn't much longer.

The opening and closing numbers are quite a bit more consistent than the middle of the album. The standout song here is the title track, which opens the album. It's a little different from the classic Traffic sound, though I can't explain exactly why. Maybe it's because there is no sign of either folk or R&B; while neither of these necessarily defined the band, one or the other (or both) were present in most of their work. Anyway, "Shoot Out at the Fantasy Factory" is one of Traffic's best songs. As is the case with "Tragic Magic," this one might've sounded pretty good if the improvisation had gone on for a few more minutes.

The last song, "(Sometimes I Feel So) Uninspired," is quasi-gospel, which is something Winwood can, and does, pull off. It's nothing terribly special compared to the average track on the group's prior two albums, but it's a welcome assurance that Shoot Out at the Fantasy Factory wasn't just the title track plus filler.

Shoot Out at the Fantasy Factory is, on the whole, a decent album, but while it's not Traffic's last album, it sounds like a record of a group of musicians who should probably take a break from each other. Although it's considerably better than the group's two- star debut Mr. Fantasy, Shoot Out at the Fantasy Factory is nonetheless a two-star effort, and these two LPs serve to illustrate just how wide a range is encompassed by the two-star rating.

If you're interested in Traffic, I suggest you hold off on purchasing Shoot Out at the Fantasy Factory until after listening to and enjoying John Barleycorn Must Die and The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys.

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*"Roll Right Stones" was originally 13:47, and is restored to that time as of the 2003 Island remaster.

patrickq | 2/5 |

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