Deep Purple – Splat! (earMusic) – Don’t call them precious, priceless is just fine, no swollen heads though. Wonder who The Rider is about? The fact that Deep Purple are sounding as good as they are here in the roaring twenties is to ve celebrated. They are rather priceless in the best of ways and you know what, I couldn’t really give a flying flip about how cool or uncool it might be to say it. Deep Purple are sounding damn good these days.
There are motifs familiar from recent albums, the here and now rather than the way (way) back (not that there was anything much wrong with what they did in the way way back). Purple have been on form in recent years and this time they got us way before the third call. I was curious, I was waiting for this one, after the fine thing that was the last album this one was something to be waiting for (and scribbling gibberish about maybe?). Listening to it is what I planed to do on Wednesday (although it didn’t land until Thursday). The last album had primed us and ready for this one and well, if you didn’t catch that one then you might be forgiven for thinking they might be well past their sell by date by now (well no, you shouldn’t be forgiven, I’m with Public Enemy when it comes to the plague of ageism).
Deep Purple are sounding lean, focused, there’s nothing on this album that lasts as long as five minutes which, considering this is Deep purple, rather remarkable. They sound like a band with business that needs to be done, there’s a sparkle in their collective eye, they’re out of their hole. Do we thank (or blame depending on your point of view) Bob Ezrin, do we point to guitarist Simon McBride…
“…then Steve Morse left a couple of years ago and we moved away from that sort of slight fusion between English rock and American Southern rock. Amazing player Steve was. And we were joined by Simon McBride from Belfast and we’ve got our mojo back I think to a certain extent as far as the British rock style was concerned from our heart and the energy”.
Simon McBride is economic, a rare thing in terms of a band like this, you don’t feel he needs to impose himself, that he feelS the need to prove anything and with that in mind he really is enabling the flow of that classic Deep Purple, that classic interaction between guitar and keyboards, that twin attack, backed up by that rather underrated way Ian Paice plays before we even get to the way Roger Glover anchors it all. That two up front and no holding back, strong midfield behind them, always on the front foot think. I like this McBride version or Purple, I like the way they’re working, the way they’re flowing and I really (really) like that it really seems to matter when they could so easily just dial it in and quite probably get away with it. This is high-octane Deep Purple, this is a band that matters again. And without imposing himself of it Simon McBride’s personality is coming out…
“This album started about a year and a bit ago as a follow-up to =1. And the process has always been the same since ’69 with the band. We just… I think, think of ourselves as a primarily instrumental band. So all the music gets written first and the songs get plunked on top afterwards. It’s always been that way…
2024’s =1 had us interested – is the new Deep Purple album any good? – Yes it was! And the answer to that question is why we’re not that surprised about the quality of this one, they weren’t bad live a couple of years either despite the awful venue – The evening after the night before, feels like there’s more than just a Swiss casino burning right now, Deep Purple can still cut it though, even in a gawdawful place like London’s soulsucking enermo dome… – and yes Bob Ezrin production and his insistence, actually, here’s how frontman Ian Gillan tells it:
“…at which point we go to Nashville and we do another writing session just to polish things up and improve the arrangements until Bob comes in for the real arrangements. Bob Ezrin has made a big difference to us in that respect over the years because we’ve never really had a leader that would say ‘this, that, or the other’ as to how things should be. So we’d spend days and sometimes weeks on arrangements just enjoying ourselves. And Bob came in and you’d suddenly hear this famous phrase: ‘I’m not liking that.’ And so he would… and seven-minute songs suddenly became four-and-a-half-minute songs and they added a lot more vibrancy and immediacy to the end product because they didn’t meander so much. So it was an amazing thing he did….”
And as much as I do want Deep Purple to meander, as much as I do want then to go space trucking for forty odd minutes like they once would have done without a hint of a second thought, I do rather like this lean modern here and now version. The important thing is it is still in there, that interaction, that guitar and keyboard both talking the lead thing that is their trademark, that hard rock thing, those prog rock duels and those Hammond runs, it is all here and the important thing is that it still seems to matter to them and why wouldn’t it? Apparently Ian Gillan, well no, over to the man again, let him tell it; “I vowed when I was 60 years old that I would never scream again on a record but I couldn’t help it…”
All you really need to know is that Deep Purple are still screaming, that they just made another damn fine hard rock record, a new one just as lean as the last one. there’s some fun in the lyrics along with a song about song is about the futility of it all that tells the story of peering through the mist and two old, craggy, knobby, battle-weary men and, oh look, Purple are sounding good, it all fits, a properl album, a propaer album band, they’re making great hard rock albums, Deep Purple are in a good place, that’s all you need to know… (sw)
Previously
THE ORGAN 