Soft Machine: Third - 1970

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The first two Soft Machine albums were the Piper At The Gates Of Dawn-esque, very psychedelic and wild collection of segued madcap snippets - The Soft Machine from 1968 and the slightly more jazzy but still extremely psych - as well as extremely irritating - Volume Two from 1969. As you can by the bloated track listings, there are a lot of short numbers here, particularly on Volume Two. The worst of prog? For me, indeed. Mind you, that is to forget all that extended indulgence yet to come in the seventies!

Can I be bothered to attempt to analyse these two albums, track by track, in my usual style? Sorry, no. Anyway, let's hurry on to this ground-breaking but somewhat indigestible double...

This was a double album that contained a single side of music on each of its four sides. Considered their best piece of work, it marks the shift in the band's music from the psychedelia of their first two albums to Canterbury sound jazz stylings, although the first track is anything but that. 

Facelift is a droning electronic dirge featuring atonal saxophone and keyboards for the first five minutes of its nearly nineteen minutes. Then it breaks out somewhat to include some drumming and more discordant saxophone, until seven minutes in when some psychedelic guitar arrives. It is very reminiscent of Can or King Crimson and while it clearly pushes the boundaries it is a struggle to get through. Once listened to, a have no real desire to sit through it again.

Far more typically "Canterbury" is the much more appealing Slightly All The Time, which features some lovely, subtle bass among its medley of different instrumental pieces, along with some intoxicating jazzy cymbal work and innovative keyboards. It is still a decidedly off the wall piece of work, however, nothing really like the pleasing melodies that fellow Canterbury scene band Caravan served up.

Moon In June contains some slightly muffled Can-style vocals and lots of proggy keyboards bleeping and swirling around. While Caravan's stuff was often more folk-rock than prog, this is most definitely prog. There is a great bit of bass-work after eight minutes, but treats like this are buried in a bit too much sprawling sonic murk for my liking. The same applies to Out-Bloody-Rageous too - some nice jazzy breaks after five minutes, but before that came five wasted minutes of pointless, unlistenable indulgence. Nice bass and cymbals after eleven as well, but these purple passages are too few and far between. Despite some occasional good passages, overall give me Caravan or Camel any day.

Secondary, 2 of 5

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