Sunday, January 23, 2011

#280 T. Rex - The Slider

AMG! Man, there are a lot of bands who I said, years ago "I think I'll check these guys out", so I got their acknowledged best album, loved it, and then never followed up. So many also-good albums that I've never heard. Electric Warrior is great, and I hear this one's up there too.

Well, I don't know that I agree. This album's a lot more repetitive, a lot more homogeneous than Electric Warrior. In some ways, this works to its favor. It leads to a hypnotic, psychadelic experience as a whole, alternating strummy, croony meanderers and bigassed stompers, which somehow follow surprisingly similar structures. There's some core hook or riff or lick or sentiment, and that's the backbone of the song, and it will be there from the front to the back, with everything branching from it. Again, sometimes it works. Buick Mackane is an over-indulgent, but kinda enjoyable jam, and Metal Guru builds a real nice communal, hypnotic stomp from its main line and its endless repetition. But so much of the rest just comes across as kind of uninspired, sounding like late-era Supergrass (that's, Diamond Hoo-Ha excluded, a bad thing). The swagger is there, but it just isn't enough.

In some ways, its the opposite of The Small Faces' album. For every time TAb4SF swerves, this repeats its groove stubbornly. That's not such a bad thing, this is probably a great late-night album, but I'm finding it a little unimpressive, and certainly no peer to Electric Warrior 3/5

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