Soft Machine Third
This is another album I own, though I don’t play it very often, and listening for this project was almost like listening to it for the first time. This is the album that, with the loss of Daevid Allen then Kevin Ayers , marked the Soft’s transition to a fully-fledged jazz-rock band.
As albums go it was held to be important and has certainly been influential. It is regularly cited as a ‘classic’ of its kind and I suppose it is. I have mixed feelings about it, though; a bit like Bitches Brew I’m never sure whether I like it or not, and the root of my discontent is, I think, Mike Ratledge’s keyboard sound, especially his tone generator, and his noodly solos.
For much of the album, the sound is dense and occasionally falls into the ‘make a strange noise here’ trope, or possibly trap. They also have a habit of extending modal soloing over repetitive riffs without really going anywhere. Ratlidge’s Out Bloody Rageous starts and ends sounding like Terry Riley’s A Rainbow In Curved Air without any necessary connection to the bits in the middle.
It’s a relief when Wyatt’s side (double album, one track per side) kicks off and starts something recognisable as a song., though it, too, is overextended.
Hugh Hopper (bass) and Wyatt are solid throughout, but there’s a bit too much pointless vamping for my tastes, which is a shame because bits of it, like the vaguely pastoral section in the middle of Slightly All The Time are lovely.
I listened to the CD, but it’s on Spotify and has been uploaded several times to YouTube, for example:
Recent Comments