HIDDEN DETAILS

After Soft Machine ground to a halt in the late 1970s, the name may have laid dormant but the musicians involved kept going, and occasionally dipped back into Softworld for a quick visit. There was the deeply misguided Land of Cockayne album, and there were the odd musical projects here and there involving some subset of the band's personnel or other like Soft Heap, Soft Head, Soft Ware, Soft Works, and so on.

Then in 2004 came Soft Machine Legacy, a new formation which ended up sustaining itself longer than any of those other Soft off-shoots had managed. By the 2013 release of Burden of Proof, an understanding developed that legally speaking the group could simply call themselves Soft Machine if they wanted to, but the members preferred to remain one step removed for the time being.

Then in 2015, the "Legacy" was jettisoned and the lineup that recorded Burden of Proof embraced the mantle of Soft Machine. This would be the team of John Etheridge on guitar, Roy Babbington on bass, John Marshall behind the drum kit, and Theo Travis on flute, Fender Rhodes piano, and saxophone. This is, of course, a bit of a Ship of Theseus situation - none of the original founders of the band are here.

Then again, Soft Machine hit that point much earlier in their history than this - for a good while Mike Ratledge was the only founder member left after Daevid Allen, Kevin Ayers, and Robert Wyatt, and his creative contributions tailed off sharply towards the end of his tenure, to the point where he was only in a guest spot on Softs and wasn't on Alive and Well: Recorded In Paris at all. Babbington and Marshall were, at least, stalwarts of the post-Wyatt era of the band, and Etheridge played a key role in the latter 1970s releases due to replacing Allan Holdsworth, who'd rather transformed the group's sound by adding electric guitar on Bundles. The only person here who wasn't actually on a 1970s Soft Machine release is Theo Travis, and as a regular Steven Wilson collaborator, a member of The Tangent, and a contributor to some Gong releases he's got a perfectly respectable musical pedigree of his own.

Sonically speaking, then, we're largely dealing with something much more like the post-Wyatt jazz fusion era of the band than their early psychedelic days. There's even updated takes on some old Soft Machine tracks here - The Man Who Waved At Trains having originally appeared on Bundles. (An extract of Out Bloody Rageous is also played, and whilst that Third-era track is one that Robert Wyatt played on, it's also one of the jazz fusion instrumentals of that release which heralded the future direction of the band.) Theo Travis slots into this style adeptly, his contributions on various instruments managing to fit into the ethos of the group like it always belonged, and the album includes some of the most emotionally affecting guitar playing I've ever heard Etheridge offer up.

Etheridge and Travis co-produce, and the standard of production here is truly top-notch, offering a clarity which really teases out the best of the material here. This incarnation of Soft Machine clearly have realised that they aren't going to be doing anything massively genre-defining like early incarnations of the band managed - so if they can't hit "ground- breaking", they may as well go for "well-executed", and that's what they hit here, a solid album of Canterbury-style fusion with a pristine production job. It's not going to win over anyone who thinks that Soft Machine became worthless once Robert Wyatt left (or once Robert Wyatt was banned from singing, or once Kevin Ayers left, or once Daevid Allen left...), but if you like fusion-era Soft Machine this can stand next to any of the albums from Fourth to Softs without embarrassment, and indeed is better than some of the releases during that era.