Thursday 9 June 2016

Hi-Tek [not the hip-hop star] from the UK 1981






Light fusion here from this one-off band headed by Richard Niles, a producer.  Similar to the Iguazu album but more advanced into the eighties sound.  It has an indebtedness to the big band world which detracts somewhat from the overall enjoyment at least for me.  For example, a track called The Rack takes a fuzakoid approach to what would otherwise have been an excellent riff for a fuzzy electric guitar:





Had it been scored for synths and guitars, it would have been bang-on.  Each song has an (inadequately) explanatory subtitle which in this case is "will the big bands ever go away?"  

The last side 1 track called Empathy has the grammatically oddly incorrect addition: "it's not home, but I call it much:"





But you will agree it is quite pleasant and has a lot of potential.  Overall this record is mostly instr. except a totally forgettable jazz track called For You on side 1 and the bebop one on side 2 which is again marred by excessive bigbandedness (I don't mind the big band sound, as long as it's not eighties styled as in this opus).

At the bottom a blurb from Niles that is so similar to many we have seen in these pages:

Music is not a matter of what you can hear,
but what you can make other people hear.
(Niles after Degas)

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