BEFORE I FORGET

Jon Lord made some strange decisions in the late 70's/early 80's. Joining Whitesnake was one of them and recording Before I Forget was another. Lord's motivation behind making this album seems to have been to show Keith Emerson that he (i.e. Lord) could make an album worse than Emerson's Honky! I'm not sure whether he succeeded with that difficult task, but the two albums are close in badness. The major problem is that Lord seems not to know in what direction he wanted to go; we have Blues Rock, Rock 'N' Roll and Classical music in a pretty disparate mix. He is alternating between the different styles, but never once is he trying to fuse them together to create something more interesting. I'm not saying that all the material here is bad, there are indeed some decent moments. But there is nothing as good as would have been needed to save this album from overall mediocrity.

The three first tracks are very mundane bluesy Rock 'N' Roll songs whose only redeeming feature is a decent organ solo. The fourth track is actually the only thing that is remotely interesting on this album; it is an eight minute long Bach influenced track with nice keyboard work and some electric guitar. Good, but nothing too impressive. After this the album slows down quite a bit and changes its nature radically. It visits parts that come very close to what Lord would do many years later on his Pictured Within album. Most of the rest of the songs are based on grand piano, strings and guest vocals by "classical" singers (some of which would resurface on the Pictured Within album). Needless to say, most of these songs have absolutely nothing to do with Rock, progressive or otherwise. They are not bad songs, but not really my cup of tea.

Among all the tracks from the title track onwards, only Going Home strays from this Classical style. It is a cheerful, somewhat jazzy, up tempo instrumental piece and whose main melody is played on some keyboard instrument. It feels totally out of place among those classically oriented songs.

My version of this album has a 16 minute radio interview with Jon Lord recorded at the time of this album's release. This is easily the most interesting track and Jon is a very charming and funny person.

A weak album with only a few decent moments, only recommended for fans and followers of the Lord.

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