According to guitarist Michael Timmins, apparent spokesman for this ever so incestuous foursome, “The idea behind ‘Sing In My Meadows’ was to create an album that referenced an aspect of our live performances that we don’t dig into very much in our studio recordings. We wanted the album to revolve around those psychedelic, blues-inspired forays we are so fond of exploring on stage.”
Not a truer word spoken. Take a band that continues to trail blaze through cultural dictum with its mix of blues, folk, jazz, psychedelia and moaning vocals that scream through portentous whisperings and add the gritty Crazy Horse-inspired purity within chaos of the live performance and you have something very special indeed. However, though this is a brave move by the band, and has paid off in its intent to capture the essence of a band at their seminal seat-of-their-pants best it also begs the question of its import for a band with a plethora of live albums already in circulation.
Wandering psych-sax syncopated ‘Continental Drift’ sets the standard for the LP with its loosely cohesive sludgy lysergic guitar lethargy harmonising with Margo’s hauntingly callous summation of a murder most graphic.
‘It’s heavy down here’ sees the tempo in freefall with lack of musical direction being the order of the day and lack of audience interest clear amongst the moronic tedium of its five minutes of repetitive onanism.
‘3rd Crusade’ is slightly more upbeat and the instrumentation increasingly clear but the meandering self-indulgence continues with I doubt only their most devout followers willing to put up with, let alone buy this drivel.
And so it continues for nay on half an hour – a river losing its way to the estuary – with the pointlessness of the album becoming clearer by the second. If you want a live album then buy one of the many already out there, the idea of a studio album recorded with the purpose of reproducing a live performance is mindless in the extreme.
Don’t buy it unless you’re hobby is collecting inconsequential castaways.
