“Oh Yeah”, Almost Forgotten
My birthday, “Oh Yeah”, that was last Wednesday, my 43rd, on 5 September.
This is what I really meant:
This one was part of my vinyl album collection, when I had some vinyl albums, and I wondered why it never came out on CD. I checked from time to time to see if it had, and now it has (as of 2006! I hadn’t checked in a while). What I enjoyed so much about this record its the funky playfulness. It’s as complex as Hammer’s Mahavishnu Orchestra past would suggest, but Fernando Saunders, Steve Kindler, Tony Smith and David Earle Johnson, play with a lightness that suggests a real enjoyment of the material. The opener, “Magical Dog”, swings like a beast with a great, incredibly catchy melody, and sets the tone for the rest of the recording. The playing is at an incredibly high level, and never falls into the noodle bowl. The title track is a four-on-the-floor rave-up with a strange little coda, and “Evolove”, despite the suspicious title, kicks like a lost mid-tempo Mahavishnu track, and Bambu Forest echoes the MO’s flavor of dramatic melodicism.
There are a couple of vocal tracks, the first, “One To One” a go’er, the second, “Let The Children Grow” perhaps less so, of its time, with some nods to Stevie Wonder.
The closer “Red And Orange” opens with some 32-note classicism before mutating into an altogether different beast with some trading of lighting-fast solos between Kindler and Hammer, and closes with some Crimson-esque chordal hits under the final melody.
Guilty pleasure? Yes. Worth it? without a doubt.