Mountain - Avalanche

A band who can deliver a monster like "Mississippi Queen" must have deeper cuts just waiting to be discovered ... right?

Let's find out.

I found this in the dollar bin, and while it cleaned up okay, I didn't realize there was a pretty good wobble in the vinyl. I have a weight stabilizer and it helped a bit, although the first cut on each side is a little off until it settles in - but it isn't too noticeable. This really doesn't have anything to do with the album, but it was part of my experience with the album, so I'll allow it.

The first thing that stood out was how tacky and, well, bad the album design was. Sure, it was the early '70s, an era when pretty much anything was allowed - or tried - but come on, this was also the era of really great Roger Dean covers, so having a cover with a blurry "action shot" of Leslie West and Felix Pappalardi surrounded by weird cartoon bird creatures that looked like angry McDonald's Fry Guys or, worse, Technicolor copies of Woodstock (if you don't know who that is, there really is a generation gap) - the cover hardly screams "Buy me, I'm cool."

The second thing that stood out was how bland the songs on the album were. I mean, they were lifeless. Admittedly, there were some flashes of energy here and there, but mostly this was "meh" and pretty disappointing. It's not like I came to this with any expectations, and dagnabbit, I try to look for silver linings - I'm pretty forgiving. Really, I almost liked an album by Jack Wagner, so it's not like I can't try and find a few nice things to say.

Let's do the nice things: I liked the instrumental "Alisan" with Leslie West on guitar. It wasn't too flashy - it was tasteful but a tad too long. The band had chops - make no mistake, those boys could play. Heck, as I'm closing out the first side, the band is tearing it up, in a good way, with their cover of The Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction." This is the best song on the first side. When I first read the back cover and saw two covers: "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" and "Satisfaction," I was actually kind of intrigued. The first cover was lifeless and totally forgettable - I've played the album several times through now, and I can't remember how it went. "Satisfaction," though, is pretty cool but ultimately forgettable.

The second side charges out of the gate with the thick, fuzz-driven riff-infused "Thumbsucker." It's a decent song, and is one of the better cuts on the album. However, being the best song on a pretty mediocre '70s psychedelic-leaning rock album is being damned with faint praise. I'm sort of running out of nice things to say.

I really wanted to like this ... I went into this wanting to like it. I suppose there will be people who really like this, and I suspect it will be a time and place thing. Me trying to digest this based on my tastes today can be unfair, but it is what it is. I suppose if eleven-year-old me had grown up with this one, I might think differently - but I suspect, and I am not alone in my assessment of how disappointing this was overall. I'll look for a greatest hits, and probably still only really like "Mississippi Queen" - but I'll find out one day.

There's no doubt Mountain are deserving of respect. Like I said at the start, they wrote a monster hit that's part of the rock pantheon of all-time great rock songs in "Mississippi Queen," and by 1974 they'd been riding their own coattails for a few albums. As fate would have it, after Avalanche, the band would essentially break up and wouldn't be heard again for the rest of the '70s.

Styx - Paradise Theater

Styx was hands down one of my favourite bands as a kid. They were a strange band, even back then. They were a hard rock band, almost progressive at times, who had a penchant for sucky ballads. I know there's a tendency for people to zero in on "Babe" as the song that killed the band's credibility. The roots go way back to almost the beginning when Styx released "Lady" on their second album. It showed a side to the band that needed to be kept in check, and for the most part the band kept things on a pretty tight leash. The band had been setting a gruelling pace, releasing an album a year (two in 1972) and by the time they released Paradise Theater (if I end up writing theatre later it's because that's how we spell it here) in 1981 they'd dropped ten albums in less than a decade. I snapped this up as soon as I saw it, and it became a fixture on my turntable. Like the band had announced on "Borrowed Time" from 1979's Cornerstone , ...

Billy Rankin - Growin' Up Too Fast

Growin' Up Too Fast was never widely released on CD (if at all), and it was one of the albums I really wanted to get back after a basement flood wiped out my vinyl collection in the '90s (when no one really gave a shit about records, and my insurance gave me a couple hundred bucks for an appraised $10,000 collection). Way back in 1984, my (dearly departed and greatly missed) buddy Dave let me borrow his cassette copy, which included a bonus track of "Get It On (Bang A Gong)." When I eventually bought the album, I didn't know it was a bonus track, or even what a bonus track was. If that sentence was hard to read, just go back and skim it. I'm sure you'll get the gist. I'd find out later Billy was an off-and-on-again member of Nazareth and wrote some absolutely killer songs for them. At the time, though, all I knew was this guy laid it out cold with the opening cut, "Baby Come Back," then proceeded to lay down one killer tune after another bef...

Garfield - Strange Streets

I'd seen this before in the bin, but kept flipping through the stacks. I'd see it a few more times, each time stopping to look at it a little more. There was something kind of cool about the cover where the stylized Celtic knot had the dotted yellow line - it was a strange street for sure. I pulled the record out of the jacket and I was struck by the centre image. There was the familiar Mercury label, the same one I'd seen a thousand times on BTO's Head On album. Well, I'd bought things based on odd associations before - like when I had to buy anything that Solid Rock Records released (this was generally a good thing) - so who knows, maybe this was a hidden gem. There weren't any real scratches or rash, just a lot of dirt and dust. It seemed to clean up okay, but we'll see how it goes. The album opens with the title track, and this wasn't straight-ahead pop or rock. It was leaning toward the progressive, but with a pop bent. Oddly enough, the vocals rem...

Old Enough to Forget

Search This Blog