Friday, November 22, 2024

Ivory, USA-California


Ivory. 1973 Playboy

Here we go again, another album that is about half excellent, half dreadful. Starts out promising enough with a heavy organ rocker that wouldn't be out of place on a Uriah Heep album. This then leads into three tracks that are... well... they're terrible. Anywhere from woman-done-me-wrong blues to ragtime. No redeeming value whatsoever, no matter how you try to rationalize it. So of course, from there on it's prog rock. Get out the organ, Moog, and piano and let's play us some complicated ELP style music shall we? Heck, some of the riffs even recall the Italian interpretation of the English famous trio (think Alphataurus / L'Uovo Colombo here). And so it goes throughout Side 2, complete with an Indian bit with sitar, tablas and the works. Sigh. Any chance there's a full archive of this style sitting in a vault somewhere?

Priority: none

1/30/11 (new entry); 8/4/19

3 comments:

nnknsh said...

This used to be a bargain bin regular (I mean, in Japan !) and once had one myself.

Remember it having one excellent track (the opener of side 2), and few OK tracks (the opening one, and the final one) but sold it eventually as too much of it was sub-par.

Purple Peak Records said...

Haha. To my surprise, I didn't recognize the cover, as I would have expected this to also be a $1 binner here in the States back in the 80s and early 90s. I'm still a bit surprised just how great a couple of the pieces are - though on the whole not a necessary album. But if they had more in the vaults like those great pieces - it could be a winner!

Thanks Nobuhisa for the comment.

Steve Pinkston said...

I dunno ... I kind of liked it. I have several copies!

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