Whatever impulse it is that causes a person in a good mood to wink his eye and grin at you is the same impulse that drives this music. "Light Up," with its chippy guitar lead and piquant vocal, is buoyantly humorous. "Light Up or Leave Me Alone," by Jim Capaldi, and Rick Grech's "Rock and Roll Stew" are, compared to Winwood's material, uninspired compositions, but both in the hands of the Traffic musicians are very pleasing and well worth listening to. Toward the end of the piece, the flute becomes dominant, tabla drumming starts in, and the music seems to somehow have relocated itself from old England to that Eastern-sounding world often conjured up by Pharoah Sanders and Alice Coltrane. In this song, as in all on this album, overdubs on vocals and instrumentals are used moderately and economically for maximum effect. Grech's bass is sturdy, Capaldi gets a hollow sound from his drums, Winwood sings in his high and sibilant balladeering voice, and Wood ties everything together with a subdued flute accompaniment. As with John Barleycorn, the harmonies are English traditional sounding and the beat calypsoish.
The album opens with "Hidden Treasure," a number which could at first be easily mistaken for the work of Pentangle minus Jacqui McShee. Although he is not up to his highest form as a composer, as musicians he and Traffic have never played better. He achieved additive results, improving upon at his mixing desk both the weak and the strong compositions of the album. His work with the tracks in every case produced an integration of sounds which left nothing either crowded or isolated. And it's a lot of credit that he deserves for the meticulous job he's accomplished.
Jimmy Miller produced the first three Traffic albums Steve Winwood received one third of the credit for the fourth one, and takes all of it for this, the fifth. Just as Traffic has provided some of the best onstage music performances of any group on the rock circuit, their albums have been among the best recorded in the business. Traffic - The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys
0 kommentar(er)
