CANTERBURY SCENE

They lack the distinctive sense of humour Daevid Allen brought to proceedings, but frankly that's for the best - the last thing they should be trying to do is imitate Allen's inimitable persona, which was the main thing which sold the jokier side of classic Gong anyway. Instead, they're offering a trip through the spacier side of the Canterbury, or perhaps the jazzier side of space rock - in this part of the musical map, the boundaries get fuzzy.

If The Universe Also Collapses was their take on the approach of You, erring as it did towards longer compositions, this takes a different approach, focusing more on shorter songs which are nonetheless part of a song cycle. It's a terse release at less than 40 minutes, but that just suggests they're applying sensible levels of quality control rather than jamming endlessly, and certainly I found the whole thing enjoyable. It's not as eye-opening as the band's classics, nor is it as ambitious as The Universe Also Collapses, but it certainly suggests that the creative spark is still flickering away at the heart of Gong.

The only thing keeping me from giving this 5 stars is that 3 of 4 song section beginning with "Joy Of A Toy" from the debut and included "Whisper Back" and "The Stars Apart" which are all fine just not in the same league as the rest of the album in my opinion. The rest of the album is subtle and chilled. Feels like some improvizing is going on at times with the drums, bass and whoever else isn't the soloist during these passages. Surprisingly trippy and atmospheric and Theo Travis helps with this adding electronics throughout the album. Attention to detail and I love Marshall on here, he seems like he's playing random stuff a lot but man with the Fender Rhodes, those guitar expressions, electronics and flute I just love the mood. It really was when I sat down and really listened to this album that it clicked big time.

The spirit of "Softs" is very much a part of this record in fact this would have been a great followup to it. This is headphone music, just so much going on and yet it is a reflective recording as well. I am blown away by most of these tracks but I think my favourite is "Fell To Earth" where we get some grit in that guitar and the opening sax could be Mel Collins from his "Island" performance. Some experimental stuff going on here, I mean check it out 2 minutes in. The closer "Back In Season" is a highlight with the electric piano in fact "Softs" really comes to mind here. Love the flute too.

Again the flute and Fender Rhodes are incredible on the opener "Careless Eyes", some soaring guitar leads too. Love "Penny Hitch" from one of my favourite SOFT MACHINE albums "Seven" and "Crooked Usage" the longest piece on here at 8 1/2 minutes. This song encapsulates what this album is about with the improv sounding bits with no melody, the flute and electric piano all shine and it's experimental late. "The Visitor At The Window" reminds me of the covid situation where many meeting apparently were done this way. I like it but I like "Maybe Never" even better. It's so chilled with the fluttering flute and guitar expressions along with the electronics, bass and drums.

With Marshall and Babbington out of the picture I was thinking it might be time to put SOFT MACHINE to bed and then I heard this album. Keep them coming boys!

As on the preceding album, the group make no attempt to mimic Allen's distinctive sense of humour, perhaps wisely - that was sufficiently personal to Allen that attempts to copy it would fall flat. That said, attempts to do "Gong without Daevid Allen" are by no means new - it happened on Shamal, it happened in numerous spin-off projects using the name, and on Rejoice! I'm Dead! it happened once more.

Torabi and Sturt still, however, need to do something which is distinctly Gong-like with the project, even if the humour and the Pothead Pixies mythology is set aside, but I think they absolutely succeed here. If you had to answer the question "What is Gong?" without making reference to Allen's persona, humour, and mythology, you could say "They're the most enduringly psychedelic and spacey of the original wave of Canterbury bands" and I think most Gong fans would agree with that. After all, isn't one of their most celebrated albums You, in which the Allen-inspired humour drifts away in favour of intense instrumental workouts?

That's pretty much what you get here - jazzy, psychedelic, spacey Canterbury, using modern instrumentation and textures to produce a 21st Century equivalent of, say, the longer tracks on You. If you're into that side of Gong, you'll find a lot to like here, and I suspect that goes for most Gong fans - I know more people who tolerate the Allen whimsy for the sake of the space-Canterbury workouts than I do people who sit through the latter wishing the band would get back to the teapot jokes.

The band offers a big thankyou to Moonjune Records owner Leonardo Pavkovic suggesting the tour and album would not have happened without his tireless effort and support. I was glad to have spent time with "Hidden Details" recently, that 2018 record, as it does get represented here as being the most recent SOFT MACHINE release.

The highlights for me are not surprising as we get plenty of nods to the past on this one hour recording and I will list those songs but the one track from "Hidden Details" I'm kind of taken with is "Life On Bridges" and it will just make my top five here. The song reminds me of NUCLEUS when they were at their melancholic best.

Number one song though is "The Tale Of Taliesin" from "Softs" and an all time favourite for me from this band. I don't have this as a live track except here so it certainly adds to the value of this recording for me. Etheridge is awesome, come on! The first 3 minutes are stunning. The other three tracks that stand out for me are "Out-Bloody-Rageous", "Hazard Profile Pt.1" and "The Man Who Waved At Trains" all SOFT MACHINE classics.

You know down the road we're going to get some archival releases from this period and later but as of right now this is the last record of John Marshall playing live. We get his short 2 minute drum solo called "Side Burn" but I like his performance on "The Tale Of The Taliesin" the best. I'll say it again Theo Travis deserves a lot of credit for taking the SOFT MACHINE bull by the horns and being the main composer and producer. A solid 4 stars.

There are wonderful anthems like "Videos", "Barefoot" and 10. "What in the World" and then the twisted "Out of the Shadows" which runs over twelve minutes and which recalls Ed Wynne's Ozric Tentacles in its electric moment.

The Line-up is an incredible combo of "Sacred Monsters" Didier Malherbe, Tony Coe, Jimmy Hastings, Hugh Hopper, Andy Ward, Pip Pyle.

Overall, an unmissable album!!!

...but just 'cos "I tray to break through and do some fresh and new", this is not exactly a progressive album ...or is it?

The answer is an emphatic "yes". Allen is not wholly absent here - some vocals are used on Beatrix, some lyrics of his make it in - but these contributions are thin scraps, Allen passing through as a ghost at the gig rather than being a full participant in the album's creation. The end result is very much the product of the current lineup.

The obvious question is "Does the classic Gong sense of humour survive?" and the answer is "Not really, but that might be for the best." The fact of the matter is that the humourous side of Gong was very much an expression of Allen's personality; in pretty much every Gong lineup and off-shoot that hasn't involved Allen, it's not been present. That isn't to say that all such projects are po-faced and humourless - Steve Hillage's solo work certainly has its lighter moments - but it is the case that Daevid was such a unique and characterful presence in any of the Gong incarnations he was involved in that once he's gone, it just ain't the same.

That being the case, a forced attempt to mimic Allen's comic-mystic persona would be doomed to failure - it would be wrong for Sturt and company to try and do that, just as it would have been wrong for Gong in the 1970s to do it when they were making Shamal, the first Dave-less Gong effort. Instead of trying to do a limp impersonation of Allen's humour, the current Gong concentrate on being worthy successors to the Gong musical heritage - and that means jazzy, psychedelic Canterbury prog, cut through with some of the more modern post-punk influences also found in Torabi's other projects such as Guapo or Cardiacs. (This, too, is appropriate - what were Planet Gong or New York Gong if not Allen's bid to embrace a somewhat more punkish/new wave ethos back in the day?)

If you're the sort of Gong listener who politely sat through Daevid's whimsy for the sake of getting to the proggy musical workouts, you'll probably love this; if you're the sort of Gong listener for whom without Daevid's humour the band has nothing to offer you, you probably won't like this, though you were probably expecting that what with him being too dead to take a full part in the recording process. If you're the sort of listener who digs both sides of Gong's music, you'll probably realise that things have shifted here - but you probably also have broad enough tastes to realise why that's a good thing.

To my ears, there's only one real clunker here, and that's JSM - a drum solo from John Marshall which manages to be everything everyone dislikes about 1970s drum solos. Sure, sure, it's technically adept, but it's fairly soulless stuff, a demonstration of dextrous proficiency without any compositional substance behind it, and it drags on for ten horrid minutes. Trim it off and you'd have four and a half stars easy, because the rest of this absolutely cooks - as it is, it's at the low end of the four star range.

This is, to be honest, exactly what you want out of a reunion exercise like this - let later lineups and other projects in the wider galaxy go more experimental and strive for novelty. Most of the lineup here would come together again in the studio to put together 2032, which can be seen as the final chapter of "old Gong" - after that, Allen and Gilli Smyth used the I See You album to pass the torch to a much younger and more or less entirely new lineup, who have kept the spirit of the group going after Allen and Smyth's deaths. 2032, though, seems to have had a fairly tepid reception. Perhaps this is a better way to remember the early 1970s veterans of the group - together again, playing the material which won over the hearts of their fanbase, and at peace with each other after the ups and downs of prior years.

Ethereal, spiritual, magical. Incredibly fluid (the non- Newtonian kind!) and solid at the same time, flowing Incredibly well through every second of each suite, yet rocking and jazzing incredibly hard at its core. Funky, psychedelic, stoned, jazzy, absolute insane masterpiece. Steve Hillage and his guitar are inseperable, them playing together in harmony at every key and every note. I liked this more than any thing (and they have some billion albums out, that means a lot) the Gong ever done! And in my opinion, that is for all the right reasons. Here Steve Hillage seems more free than he ever was before. This honestly seems like a lost Gong relic or some mysterious outtake collection from Santana's spiritual jazz period that just didn't make the cut. 'Solar Musick Suite' is a masterful guitar-led jazz-rock, 'Fish' is a goofy one-minute ditty, 'Meditation...' is an ethereal guitar solo with synth undertones, 'The Salmon Song' is a slow- building, pure rock (borderline post-metal!) jamming mini- suite, and 'Aftaglid' is a hard-rocking eclectic groove-session of a song. What I'm trying to get at 8s that this album is mad. Mad amazing! Prog on.