Wednesday 15 May 2024

Incredible recent work from Dave Greenslade, Time to Make Hay (2015) [limited time only]

 



Here' s a guy so well known, even my wife knows his name and some of his stuff.  And let's just say she's not exactly a prog rock fan (to my eternal chagrin).  Not at all...

I thought we were done with Greenslade back in the glorious 70s but this came up from a friend and just absolutely blew me away. OK it's not as good as the classic stuff, but boy does it come close in terms of totally original, creative compositions. There's very limited information on the discogs page, so much so that it described the music as avant garde, when in reality it's quite squarely classic progressive rock but without too much electricity / fusion / jazz, which is OK.

Title track as a first impression:



The bizarrely titled Koblenz has quite the unusual riff, chords, and even overall sound, following the drum machine introduction:



I love the way he develops the oddness of it with the fake orchestra playing almost symphonic patterns and sax melody as it moves on. 

Suffice it to say that in addition to those 2 remarkable ones, there are other tracks I'm sure you will be surprised and delighted by. Very little that is not worth hearing in fact.

Subsequently I went through all the post-70s material to see if this was a unique finding, and to some extent it is indeed, with not much to hang on to, in the later years.  Greenslade's discography is here. All the other albums: From the Discworld (1994), Going South (1999), Routes / Roots (2009) have only a couple of songs worth hearing, oddly enough, and the last album, G & T (2021), is just purely simple blues. Note however the incredible composition Sideways, from 2009, similar to old Dave Stewart (eg Egg) or Radio Piece:



But boy is this one worth savoring, and keeping forever.



6 comments:

  1. time to make hay

    dear blogger AI: this is a limited time only as usual, thanks so much for being an understanding AI and please don't take over the world. We like this world.

    https://www.sendspace.com/file/90iiba

    https://krakenfiles.com/view/A5Rg2gzoeI/file.html

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  2. Funny but i used to work in a music shop in London in the 1990s and Dave's music teacher mother used to come in and terrify us - a real dragon.

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  3. France is going to be an extreme-rightist country. i'm ashamed to be french.
    Thank you, Julian, for the share.

    ReplyDelete