FOURTH

Fourth - the Softs did go in for nice simple studio album titles early on in their career didn't they? - is infamously the last studio album from the Soft Machine to feature Robert Wyatt's playing, and the only one of his tenure in the band in which he is not permitted to sing (though he did have to fight tooth and nail to have Moon In June, the sole vocal track, included on Third). This under-use of Wyatt's talents is baffling to me - equally baffling is the way his drumming is sometimes buried in the mix - and as a result of that, for a good long time I found it difficult to get into.

With the recent 2007 round of remasters of this and other mid-period Soft Machine albums by Esoteric Recordings (which, among other things, makes Wyatt's drums a bit less drowned out in the mix than I remember them being in early CD versions of the album), along with my newfound appreciation for late-period Soft Machine (it helps if you regard the post-Six band as essentially being a continuation of Nucleus by other means), I've found that I'm more able to appreciate Fourth on its own terms, rather than grumping about what could have been had Wyatt been permitted to air his ideas (as he was able to anyway on the Matching Mole debut album).

Musically speaking, the tracks lie on a continuum from a slightly more jazzy take on the fusion sound of Third (as on Virtually) to an approach which takes on so much of jazz and incorporates so little rock that it's no longer really fusion, just jazz - as seen with Teeth. The difference in approach is most striking when you come to this album after listening to the absolutely blinding fusion rendition of Teeth on Grides, a live album recorded partway through the process of recording Fourth, so it's clear that quite late in the day a sudden change in direction has been mandated.

My guess is that some persons within the Machine were angling to get more recognition from the jazz establishment (having thoroughly won over the progressive rock crowd), but the end result is that material like Teeth ends up coming across as being less experimental or novel than material being released by people like Miles Davis, who at the time was approaching fusion from the jazz end (rather from the rock end as the Softs did). That said, the album still paves the way for a more serious take on Canterbury which both the Softs themselves, Wyatt, and other groups such as National Health or Gilgamesh would dip their toes into in the future. At this stage in time, Soft Machine were so ahead of the curve that even when they put their feet on the brakes a little, they're still right on the cutting edge.