![]() ![]() ‘Here They Come’, on the other hand, is based on a slow, entrancing acoustic riff with a slight medieval influence it’s dark and a little bit creepy. Sure, Alvin and the boys did try their hand at ‘mystical acoustic shuffles’ earlier, particularly on Stonedhenge, but there was basically no melody-creating back then. On no other Ten Years After album will you find, for instance, two tracks as moody and “place-taking” as ‘Here They Come’ and ‘Let The Sky Fall’. It does end in a slightly overlong speedy jam that tends to get a wee bit tedious due to Alvin’s self-restriction on the guitar, but never mind – it is all compensated further on. My guess is that it probably inspired the Stones for “Ventilator Blues” (which is a weaker song). It’s essentially just a slow blues rocker, but produced like they never tried before – with a deep and elaborate sound, echoey guitars, moody swirling organs, and tremendously atmospheric. The opening track, ‘One Of These Days’ (not to be confounded with the famous Pink Floyd instrumental, or, for that matter, with the ninety thousand other songs by other composers with the same name), kicks in with such a staggering might that it makes you go wow. ![]() Just a guy lamenting over post-Woodstock disillusionment. And while his take on the ‘we gotta get out of this place’ schtick on ‘I’d Love To Change The World’ is nothing particularly special, it comes along as sincere and never too overblown. Alvin’s lyrics rarely match the melodies in skillfulness or deepness, but as usual, he manages to walk the thin line between cliches/banality and pretentiousness just fine. On here, you’ll find the best batch of melodies ever created by the band – many of them acoustic, showing Alvin’s developing passion for the unplugged atmosphere, but some electric as well. ![]() And while it’s rather hard to believe without having heard the record, he did succeed. He wanted to be able to finally make a record that would feature him as a real solid composer, that would not just keep repeating the same lightning-speed licks over and over again. An intentional move, of course whereas I wouldn’t want to accuse Alvin of sharing the famous “guitar hero complex” that managed to overtake such six-string greats as Clapton and Jeff Beck in the early Seventies, it’s at least clear that on A Space In Time the man was keen on cutting out the crap and fully concentrating on the melodies and real musical substance. One thing strikes you immediately as you let all the tracks flow through your mind, one by one – where’s the fingerflashing? This sounds nothing like what we’ve grown to expect from the band because the main trademark element of the sound, Alvin’s blazing speedy chops, are completely missing. Alvin’s guitar is not idle either and his songwriting reached a peak at this time – never to be surpassed again. Unarguably the band’s strongest and most consistent effort since the Ssssh days, A Space In Time continues the line of Watt in its heavy use of synthesizers and special effects, but this time the members probably took out some time to make these thingamajigs actually work. Still, if there ever was a period in which they were real close to embodying some “progressive” tendencies, it was this fall of 1971, with this extremely strange, un-Ten Years After-like album, and this really great bunch of songs, with hardly a major stinker in among all the melodies. Despite all the hype, Ten Years After could never have earned the title of a “prog-rock” band: sometimes they are mistakenly lumped in with the movement, but Alvin and Co.’s ambitions never really amounted that high – for the most part, they were just hardcore blues rockers with a slight experimental edge, to distinguish them from colleagues like early Fleetwood Mac or Free. ![]()
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