CHARGE!

"Mix your mind with the moonbeams"

Paladin may only have ever released two albums, but their second "Charge" is an absolute classic of early 70's melodic prog. There are many different styles and sounds on the album, yet the whole is nothing less than a coherent masterpiece.

The Roger Dean sleeve may not be an absolute guarantee of quality, but Paladin sit well with their peers such as Yes, Uriah Heep, Asia, etc., whom Dean graced with his artwork.

There are four feature tracks on the album. The opening "Give me your hand" sets the tone, with rich organ and guitar backing a strong vocal for a fine piece of melodic hard rock. "Good lord" is a slightly softer but still upbeat song with some excellent guitar work by Derek Foley. It leads into the album's best track, the wonderfully atmospheric "Mix your mind with the moonbeams". The multi-tracked vocals and trippy lyrics are pure early 70's ("Let the cosmic light diffuse itself, in all its magic ways"). The track is awash in keyboard layers, and chiming guitars. This is PENDRAGON years before Pendragon existed! Also included is an all too rare Hammond organ solo, similar to the one on URIAH HEEP's "July Morning".

The closing track "Watching the world pass by" has it all in about 9 minutes. It starts with some interesting keyboard moods, before breaking into an almost funky harmonica led wall of sound. About midway, we suddenly lurch into a barn dance, before a superb guitar solo of some length brings the album to its climactic conclusion.

The album is rounded out by three shorter tracks. "Well we might" is an early Slade (yes Slade!) like rocker with some great guitar and some very effective stop go interludes. "Anyway" is a mellotron backed ballad which contrasts superbly with the generally upbeat nature of the album. This track appears to have been a late addition to the original LP, as it appears on a sticky label added to the track listing. "Get one together" is the only dip, being a pretty nondescript instrumental.

"Charge" is a truly superb album, very much of its time, but still highly enjoyable. The band were destined to split before recording any further albums, but at least they went out on a high.

Ooh! This is a real tough one for me, because Paladin is a decent band, but I can't help feeling that it's contribution to progressive rock is neglible at best, and non-existent at worst. When I first listened to this album I was quite put off, because I spent virtually the whole of the first half of it wondering how anyone could consider Paladin to be remotely progressive. After getting used to what the band has to offer, I've softened my initial stance, but I really don't think Charge! is anything more than an enjoyable classic rock effort with a mix of styles that do not add up to a particularly creative whole.

The opener Give Me Your Hand for example sounds a little like Uriah Heep with driving rock and searing organ, but at one point breaks into a loose soulful jam that could have cut by Traffic or Tonton Macoute. Well We Might is mindless glam-tinged (hey t'was 1972 after all) boogie rock. Get On Together is an edgy funk instrumental, all wah-wah and tearaway Hammond work from organist Pete Solley. Anyway is strangely like some John Lennon solo track I can't put my finger on. Good Lord is a breezy Allman Brothers type rocker on which guitarist Derek Foley really gets to stretch out although vocalist Lou Stonebridge rules the middle of the song with a delicious echo-laden electric piano solo! My favourite track is probably Mix Your Mind With The Moonbeams which rides a lovely lead vocal melody (that would do any Beatles wannabe proud) before launching into a dandy organ solo. Interestingly Solley's organ lines show a distinct appreciation of the work of Procol Harum's Matthew Fisher ... and Solley would join that band for the Something Magic album!

The closer Watching The World Pass By is a real hotpotch of a track (and is probably what passes for progressive) ... it has a suitably laidback opening with a tranquil harmonica solo from Stonebridge, but then after threatening to break into something interesting, it explodes into another boogie extravaganza. Round about the 4 minute mark, we are suddenly treated to some sort of hoedown fiddle fest (well Solley is on violin for this), before Foley cuts back in with some smokin' axe lines.

So what you have is a pretty good album that touches numerous classic rock cornerstones, but almost never strays into the realm of progressive rock. Perhpas this will be of interest to those who get a kick out of the art-rock stylings of a band like Babe Ruth, but from a prog point of view, this is actually quite poor. ... 45% on the MPV scale

An unusual band at an unusual time for music. Paladin had all the right pieces in place to be successful, several of them having toured with the Stones, and all of them veterans of other professional bands. But for some reason never really took off. They probably would have been completely unknown in the States had it not been for the muy excelente Roger Dean cover.

I wish I had their debut album, which from what I’ve read was recorded pretty much live in the studio and has a real improvisational feel to it. It’s been reissued with this one on a combined CD so maybe someday, but it isn’t really high on my list.

There’s an awful lot of ground covered here, and most of it well-played, but overall there isn’t any kind of contiguous theme or sound or genre or anything else to hold it together, which makes it a bit hard to listen to.

The opening “Give Me Your Hand” kicks off okay (is that cowbell?), although it gives the impression this is more of an early seventies psych-blues band, which it really isn’t. I like this song, and particularly the dueling keyboards, but the somewhat suppressed organ and multiple-vocal harmonizing (that is cowbell, by the way) place this squarely in the very early seventies, and most of these types of songs haven’t aged well. This sounds a lot like Blues Image to me.

A little boogying with “Well we Might” including a near Jerry Lee Lewis performance on piano and decent guitar from Derek Foley, but that organ still anchors this one way back in time, and Lou Stonebridge’s vocals sound like Billy Joel, which takes a bit of the edge off.

“Get one Together” is a great instrumental, and makes one wonder if these guys shouldn’t have worked up a few more like this and maybe expended them – that would have made their inclusion in a progressive rock archive made a bit more sense. This track is all about keyboards, loud, fast, and energetic. A great, although short, tune.

This was the early seventies, so somewhere there was inevitably always a strong hint of the Beatles showing up on just about any record, and on this one it’s “Any Way”, but here it sounds more like the ELO-doing-the Beatles version of the Beatles, including violin, slightly brooding Horace Wimp-like vocals, and lots of piano. I love this sound, but I usually look to Jeff Lynne to deliver it. Oh well, Lynne never managed to score a Dean cover, so these guys have that going for them at least.

If you’ve ever heard Steve Morse’s first solo album then you’ll recognize the guitar sound of “Good Lord”, sort of bluesy but threatening to cut loose with some jazz-fusion at any moment. There’s a hint of Caribbean rhythm here as well, and the two sounds combined would have made this the strongest track if the vocals had been left out. Not that they’re bad, they’re just unnecessary.

I’m thinking the progressive label gets put on this band largely because of the last two tracks (and the Dean cover – let’s not fool ourselves). Lyrics about moonbeams and cosmic magic, ripples on the pond of the universe (torch one up Timmy!), this is a very pleasant and keyboard-intense psych/folk head trip, complete with the obligatory and completely self-indulgent Rod Argent-like organ solo, and a little guitar fuzz at the end for added space effect. Good stuff.

And the best for last – “”Watching the World Pass By”. The opening harmonica is misleading, as this track wanders on for over nine minutes and manages to cover quite a bit of territory, beginning with some weird organ and guitar sound effects that quickly morph into a pretty straightforward hard rock “good time lovin” stretch, which itself gives way to a jam session that would have made Duane Allman proud, then finally a soaring guitar solo to wind things up. Tasty, if not prog.

I know very little about this band other than they were sort of on the periphery for a while in the seventies, and that one of them ended up in Player, a one-hit wonder band that I got into as a teenager. Other than that this is a sort of Wishbone Ash with two keyboardists instead of two guitarists, and whose biggest album didn’t have the consistency of vision that Ash’s ‘Argus’ did. This is more like some of the Ash albums that followed that one, and most of them are good but not great. That applies to this one as well. Three stars.

peace

"Charge!" is the second full-length studio album by UK music artist Paladin. The album was released through Bronze Records in 1972. Paladin formed in 1970 and disbanded in 1973 after releasing two full-length studio albums, this one being their last.

The eponymously titled debut album from 1971 was an eclectic rock album featuring elements from jazz/rock, blues rock, progressive rock, and psychedelic rock driven by the high energy drumming by Keith Webb and the organ/piano playing by Peter Solley (the two founders of the band). The vocals from Lou Stonebridge were decent enough, but nothing out of the ordinary for the time, and all those elements and trends are continued on "Charge!".

The Roger Dean cover artwork is a bit misleading although Paladin certainly whips up a few progressive rock ideas, but this is generally a more blues rock and jazz/rock oriented release. No one would for example ever mistake a track like "Well We Might" for a progressive rock song. In fact most of the original Side 1 of the album falls in this catagory. It´s not until "Mix Your Mind With The Moonbeams" and "Watching The World Pass By" that Paladin begin to show a few more progressive tendencies. It´s nothing too complex or challenging, and still within a blues rock context, but Paladin had some nice adventurous ideas.

The album features brilliant musicianship, a powerful, organic, and detailed production job, and some solid songwriting. The latter is seldom above being solid though and it´s arguably the high level musicianship and the great energy of the performances which carry this album more than it is the songwriting. A 3 star (60%) rating is warranted.

I think that I listened to this now very hard to find album for the first time in 1975-76. One of my brothers, who plays guitar, borrowed it for a time from one of his friends. He played it very much while playing his first electric guitar while he was learning how to play it. I remember that I really didn`t like this album very much at that time, but I liked a lot the cover art, done by Roger Dean. So, since then the more associated memory that I had from this album was the cover art.

Well, I think that, strictly speaking, this is not a full Prog Rock album, but it is good anyway. I found some influences from URIAH HEEP and DEEP PURPLE in their sound, with their mix of Hard Rock with some Prog Rock arrangements. There are also some influences from PROCOL HARUM in Pete Solley`s organ playing. It is really an album with eclectic sounds, very enjoyable, that sounds a bit dated, with a sound that I found very characterisitic of some other albums released in the early seventies.

"Give Me Your Hand" is a Hard Rock song with good guitars and organ, plus some Latin-Influenced percussion. "Well We Might" is mostly an Rock and Roll song played with good slide guitar. "Get On Together" is one of the most Prog Rock influenced songs, in a song composed by the band`s drummer, Keith Webb. "Anyway" also has Prog Rock influences, with very good orchestral arrangements. "Good Lord" is another good Hard Rock song. The last songs in this album, "Mix Your Mind with the Moonbeams" and "Watching the World Pass By" are very Prog Rock in arrangements, and are among the best in this album.

Pete Solley years later played with PROCOL HARUM, adding sytnhesizers to the organ`s sound of the band for their final album of the seventies, called "Something Magic", in 1977. He was the main songwriter in this PALADIN`s album, but all the other members of the band also contributed to some songs as songwriters. It is a shame that this band only recorded two albums and later split. All the members are very good musicians. The lead and backing vocals are also very good.

A short-lived outfit featuring the much-travelled keyboardist Pete Solley(Snafu, Procol Harum, Whitesnake) amongst their membership, Paladin's main claim-to-fame seems to be the uber- cool space-age artwork of Roger Dean that adorns the front of this 1972 album, the Yes-artist's snapshot of an extra-terrestial alien warrior charging into battle surely one of his most striking pieces. The group's second release, 'Charge!' pretty much picks up from where the group's self-titled debut left off, the bulk of the material blending bluesy rhythms and Solley's jazzy organ breaks with the occasional latin flourish. The start is strong - the pacey opener 'Give Me Your Hand' features a punchy, toe-tapping chorus and powerful vocals courtesy of bassist Peter Beckett - yet the rest album is less enthralling. Plus marks, however, are given for the group's use of slide guitar and conga's, these not-so-proggy instruments adding an unusually spicy flavour, whilst a couple of tracks do feature a real melodic invention, the groovy 'Anyway' and the ambitious nine-minute closer 'Watching The World Go By' showing a deft song-writing touch sadly absent from the rest of the album. The Problem is, however, they did it all before and did it a good deal better on 1971's 'Paladin', the group's superior first album, so, essentially, what we have here is a fairly undistinguished slice of perfectly-enjoyable early-seventies prog from a solid-if-unspectacular five-piece. But the artwork rocks. STEFAN TURNER, STOKE NEWINGTON, 1972

I do love my jazz-rock. It is fantastic and it fills me with much joy. Always have. The fusion of jazz and rock is very much a match made in heaven. The grittiness and intensity of rock and the feeling and musical excurions of jazz is just perfect. Many a band have proven this to be true. Chicago and Blood, Sweat and Tears are perhaps the prime examples but there are others (Chase, Centipede, CCS and several more) aswell. Paladin is one of these bands, lurking in the more obscure marshlands of prog.

The album is beautifully made by the master of progressive album art, Roger Dean. Someone wrote, very much to the point, that his art is not a certified mark of musical quality. And that is true. In the case of Charge it is very true.

The music bears resemblance to many of the classic bands of the early batch of jazz-rock and hard rock bands of the 70's. Uriah Heep, Beatles (though barely making it into the 70's), CCS and others in that vein are all noticeable here. It must be said, however, that in their finest moments Paladin puts forth a slab of jazz-rock very much in their own flavor.

The opener, "Give me your hand", is a terrific song. Intense, heavy on the percussion and drums and very raucious. (The presence of vocals put through the Leslie speaker makes it even better.) Great song that really sets the pace, or so one is lead to believe anyway.

The second track really is a letdown for me. Uriah Heep, which is a great band, always spiced up their albums with lacklustre rock'n'roll songs and this track sounds just like on of those. The Mick Box-ish slide guitar and all. Really nothing to write home about.

"Get one together" is a hammond drenched, groovy little thing which again raises the album to great heights, only to drop to something rather boring in "Good lord". The song feels like The Beatles changed their name to Paladin and that does not work for me. Bands trying to sound like Beatles disappoints me. Though the song is well written I feel it does not do much for me.

"Mix your mind with the moonbeams" is a rather good track, showing more personality of their own. It is a jazzy, gospel-influenced rock track which works alright. The last track, "Watching the world pass by" is a great song to end it all with. A ballad-y, slower and mellow number with good organ.

Charge is really nothing to cross the desert for. There are so many other bands worthy of discovery. In truth Charge is a disappointing album. The signs of greatness are taken down to be replace by cheap ones, showing the easy way out and not being truly a band in their own right. I feel they are too much in awe and inspired by other bands, such as Beatles and actually Uriah Heep (which is sort of fun, actually). Two stars. That's it.