FIFTH [AKA: 5]

Continuing down the assembly line of blandly titled album covers with artwork to match, SOFT MACHINE saved all the creative mojo for the music itself by practically reinventing itself with every album. After drifting abruptly away from the Canterbury jazz rock of the early albums on "Fourth," Robert Wyatt finally frustrated with the incessant aggravation of complexity for its own sake in the form of avant-jazz noodling that drifted more into the space jazz realms of Sun Ra than the unique jazz-flavored rock that launched the band's career, FIFTH ( or just 5 ) was the first album to feature a new band member on every subsequent album and the beginning of transforming SOFT MACHINE more into the other famous jazz fusion band of the era - Nucleus - which would find a majority of members just a few albums down the road.

FIFTH itself is an album that showcases the very transition that SOFT MACHINE was undergoing on a seemingly monthly basis especially if you factor in all the archival live albums that showcase new aspects of the band with members not even on the studio albums. With Wyatt out of the picture completely, the band was allowed to take its wildest jazz fantasies into the realms of reality with FIFTH and that's exactly what this album accomplished. Back to the transition part. While Mike Ratledge, Elton Dean and Hugh Hopper were back for more jazzy rock juiciness, the album features not one percussionist but two. Side one featured Australian Phil Howard who honed his chops with The Keith Tippett Group but ultimately didn't have the chops to please the SOFTIES and was nixed before the recording of the album was complete.

Dissatisfied but not dismayed, the band recruited the first of the musicians to start the Nucleus invasion, namely John Marshall who had wowed the jazz fusion community with his works on "Elastic Rock" and "We'll Talk About It Later." His contributions on the second side contrast greatly with the more psychedelic and laidback approach of Howard with more outlandish drumming solos and a more technical and even louder infusion of percussive sounds. The album in some ways sounds a bit disjointed in that regard but the build of of the echoey trippy space jazz on side A actually crafts a stellar buildup for the more demanding and upbeat pieces that follow. Joining in for a guest reprise was double bass master Roy Babbington who had sat in on the "Fourth" sessions however FIFTH was a much sparser affair with no other musicians lurking in the shadows.

With every subsequent album aiming for ever greater complexities with less focus on rock and almost an obsession for improvisation jazz with freeform compositional constructs, SOFT MACHINE continued to alienate fans of yore but also failed to woo over the hardcore jazz cats who were into this sorta thing therefore FIFTH is a bit of a hard pillow to swallow after a sole or even a half dozen listening sessions. Hammering down the time signature extravaganzas like a hard bop addict of the late 1950s, SOFT MACHINE had become more entrenched in the world of avant-jazz to the point that the only recognizable connection to the past were the crazy fuzz-fueled sounds of Ratledge's organ. In many ways FIFTH is the most intangible and abstract of SOFT MACHINE's canon with loose compositional skills blurred by the free for all stampede of instrumentalists run amok.

Side one is laced with trippy echoey keyboards and chilled out saxophone noodling while Howard focuses on fancy cymbal work. The three tracks remain subdued and unsure of themselves as if they were bad children afraid to make too much noise in their room. But as side two introduces itself with bang, the mood suddenly shifts from restraint to anything goes as announced by Marshall's technical drum wizardry that begins "As If." In response Elton Dean starts the serious saxophone frenzy seemingly having a conversation with Ornette Coleman from 1959. Throughout all the changes though is the comforting stability of Ratledge's idiosyncratic organ style which pacifies the soul no matter how wild and wooly the sax and drum combo effect become. Not to say that psychedelic trippiness doesn't occur on the second side, it's just that the dynamics and tempos are way more diverse in their approach.

While it's true that from "Third" and after SOFT MACHINE was going for the gusto in creating wild and innovative jazz fusion in a style unmatched and while "Fourth" was an announcement to the world that SOFT MACHINE was more jazz than rock, FIFTH only codified it all into some sort of musical law. With flirtatious bass grooves that act in accordance with the organ tinkling and wild boy antics at the sax and drum kit, SOFT MACHINE was a veritable jazz powerhouse at this point, a mere few years after the simpler vocal oriented psychedelic pop rock that graced the first two releases. In virtually every way, FIFTH offers two phases of SOFT MACHINE in a single album as a replacement occurred smack dab in the middle of the album which basically prognosticated the band's future where every album would find one member exit and another coming aboard.

FIFTH is hardly the easiest album of the band's career to digest. It's convoluted in many ways, brash, hard to latch onto and well a bit bombastic however it's one of those albums that once adapted to properly will reveal an amazingly talented band that didn't just crank out random noise. These guys were just light years ahead of the competition in their ability to craft complex jazz rock compositions that drifted into a world of its own making. While i would doubt that FIFTH ranks as anyone's all time SOFT MACHINE album (ok i'm sure there must be a few out there!), it is hardly throwaway album that many make it out to be. Bogged down by complexity for its own sake may seem like an exercise in self-aggrandizement but hey, this is the world of jazz and that's really what it's all about. Sure the immediacy of the rock characteristics had all but vanished but as a jazz lover myself, this album has definitely gotten under my skin since my first head scratching visit. Taken on its own terms, FIFTH is actually brilliant.