HIGH TIDE

High Tide´s self titled second album from 1970 continues the great jamming heavy prog rock tradition that they initiated with Sea Shanties from 1969. Personally to me Sea Shanties is one of the greatest heavy and dark prog rock albums of the late sixties. A real hidden treasure. This album is almost as good yet a bit more jamming and unstructured.

The album consists of only three tracks: Blankman Cries Again, The Joke and Saneonimous. All three songs are pretty long ( ranging from 8:28 to 14:30 minutes) and contains short dark vocal sections and long jam sections where violin and heavily distorted guitar almost dual for a place in the solo spotlight. These jam parts are very enjoyable and remember this comes from a man who is not particularly excited about long jams. Here the jamming is done with great skill and variation and even though the jam parts are pretty long they still seem partially structured.

The band consists of great musicians. Tony Hill has a very dark and intriguing voice which reminds me of Jim Morrison at times and his distorted guitar playing is excellent and with lots of finesse. Simon House who plays electric violin and organ is also an extraordinaire musician. The rhythm section of Roger Hadden on drums and Peter Pavli on bass are also adventerous and tight.

The sound quality is very good for the time. Dark and intriguing.

The cover art is not as beautiful as on their debut but it´s still an excellent psychadelic cover.

This is a great sophmore album from High Tide. It´s really a shame they are not more famous as they really are an excellent band. This would be their last studio album in quite some time ( the follow up Interesting Times was released in 1989), but a lot of archive recordings from the seventies have been released in the early nineties. I haven´t listened to them yet but I intent to do just that very soon. 4 stars is well deserved for this brilliant dark and heavy album.