Volumes One & Two

by

Soft Machine

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I had third-row tickets to see Jimi Hendrix at the Virginia Beach Dome. But of course we had to suffer through some unknown opening act first, a trio called "The Soft Machine".

After the Soft Machine got through with us, Hendrix was an anti-climax! There was Kevin Ayers on bass guitar and vocals, Mike Ratledge on organ (with some extra sounds built in-first time I'd ever heard fuzz organ before), and up front was drummer and lead singer Robert Wyatt. The organ and bass were on a higher level behind Robert, who actually led the band.

They began their set, and played without a break for something like an hour and fifteen minutes, doing smooth transitions from one song to the other so that it came off like a suite of songs. Their musicianship was astonishing! And their music was so unlike anything I'd heard before (or since), that I was absolutely blown away! They quit, and the lights came back up, and as I looked around, I saw others with their mouths hanging open and their eyes wide, just as mine were. There was a moment or two of complete silence as people gathered their wits and came back down to earth. Then a standing ovation! We were completely wrung out.

I didn't know how much of what they did was planned and how much was improvised, but when I bought their first album, I was amazed to hear that the record was a short version of the concert that I had been lucky enough to see. A true psychadelic journey!

Hendrix did the smart thing when he came on. He left the lights on, and started slow, doing an intimate version of "Red House Blues" while smoking a cigarette, giving us time to recover, and slide into his vision of reality bit by bit.

Volume two is a logical extension of volume one. A bit jazzier, a bit more refined sound-wise than volume one, which was a bit on the raw side from time to time. But it's a further look at the same musical vision, and a unique one at that. The two albums work together well as a musical unit.

This is not background music, it is not dance music. It is not music that you listen to casually. It's music that will take you on an emotional journey if you give it a chance. It's somewhat free-form, not adhering to conventional song structures or chord progressions, but they used a lot of jazz and rock elements to make a music vision that was theirs and theirs alone.

If you have time and a reasonable attention span, give the Soft Machine a chance to show it to you. But please don't do as one clueless reviewer did, and judge a body of music from just listening to a few brief clips. That's ridiculous!

After their third album this group lost me. As much as I loved their music, they moved into personal avenues of expression that I was no longer able to share. Some songs sounded to me as if they inadvertantly recorded the time they spent tuning and doing sound checks and put that on the record instead of the songs. But the first two Soft Machine albums, and much of the Third, still shine as gems, as unique today as they were in the late sixties. Nothing like it before or since.

After listening to Soft Machine's magnum opus "Third" countless times, I thought I would look into their first and second album. Behold! A combo album! Unfortunately when purchasing this item, I overlooked in the 'Product Details' of Amazon.com that there is only one disk. Instead I made the mistake of assuming that there would be two disks because the $19.99 price tag somewhat suggests that. Perhaps most customers prefer one CD instead of two, but I found this inconvenient when importing the music onto my computer; I had to manually edit song details so that two separate albums would appear in my music library (a nuance, yes; sorry I'm a neat-freak).

Volume One (or more accurately self-titled "The Soft Machine")

This album fell short of my expectations. I think the music was at times too repetitive (e.g. "We Did it Again") and failed to execute in places where it could have. I also felt that there weren't really any 'catchy' melodies. My personal favorites though on volume one would have to be "Why Am I So Short?" and "A Certain Kind."

Volume Two

Definitely different from Volume One (in a good way) with the subtraction of Kevin Ayers and the addition of Hugh Hopper. There is whole lot of foreshadowing to what would eventually become their third album (e.g. parts of "Hibou, Anemone And Bear" sound a lot like parts from "Out-Bloody-Rageous "). Still, the album could be a bit more refinished.

Maybe Volume One is too avante garde for my taste, but I thoroughly enjoy their album "Third" and I enjoy albums from Pink Floyd such as "Ummagumma." Maybe I just need to listen to the album a few more times and I will change my mind.

I'd give this combo product four stars if it weren't for the fact that these albums need a remastering treatment from the original mastering tapes, much like Sony BMG did with Third, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh.

Pros

- combo album (~75 minutes of music)

- neat booklet with notes and photos

- backside artwork from volume one included

- cover artwork from volume two included

Cons

- both volumes packed onto one CD

- white noise (needs remastering)