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It’s 1974 and blues-rock is badly in want of a brand new guitar hero. Hendrix and Duane Allman are useless, Clapton and Peter Inexperienced are lacking in motion and Jimmy Web page was final heard essaying reggae and doo-wop pastiches on Led Zep’s Homes Of The Holy. Cometh the hour, cometh Robin Trower.
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Annoyed by not being allowed to let rip in his years with Procul Harum, Trower had given discover of intent together with his 1973 solo debut Twice Eliminated From Yesterday, which included an incendiary cowl of BB King’s “Rock Me Child” and reasonably advised he’d been within the unsuitable group all alongside. Backed by Jimmy Dewar on bass and blue-eyed soul vocals and Reg Isidore on powerhouse drums, he adopted with 1974’s epochal Bridge Of Sighs, which was to raise him to the ranks of essentially the most revered axemen of the age.
Touring America that summer time, Trower discovered himself backside of the invoice opening for Ten Years After and King Crimson. By the point the tour was over he was outselling each headliners as Bridge Of Sighs reached No 7 within the US charts and went on to multi-platinum standing.
Oddly, the album didn’t chart within the UK, however Guitar Participant journal named Bridge Of Sighs its Album Of The 12 months and Robert Fripp, having simply damaged up King Crimson, requested Trower to provide him classes as “one of many few English guitarists which have mastered bends and wobbles, capable of stand alongside American guitarists and play with an equal authority to somebody grounded in a essentially American custom.”
If Trower’s criticism had been that Procul Harum’s baroque preparations left him little house to specific himself, he set about making up for it on Bridge Of Sighs, each one of many eight tracks basically a automobile for his rampant soloing, from refined and sultry to shrieking and shredding.
The album roars out of the blocks with a savage Hendrix-like riff on “Day Of The Eagle” which midway by way of offers option to a sluggish bluesy solo harking back to Rainbow Bridge’s “Pali Hole”. The title observe – named not after the Venetian landmark however a horse whose title Trower had noticed within the racing pages – is extra Black Sabbath than Hendrix with a hypnotic riff over which Dewar intones, “Chilly wind blows/The Gods look down in anger/On this poor little one”, earlier than Trower provides a suitably doomy solo.
Dewar hits the mark once more together with his Paul Rodgers impersonation on “In This Place”, a rock ballad with loads of fats maintain from Trower’s Fender Stratocaster earlier than the tempo picks up once more with “The Idiot And Me”, an excellent blues-rock jam with a “Machine Gun”-style funk riff and which concludes with a frantic solo on which his whammy bar works extra time.
Album spotlight “Too Rolling Stoned” opens Facet Two, seven and a half minutes of Hendrix-inspired deep blues bombing. There’s a jazzy flare to “About To Start” with a tastefully melodic solo of the type the mature Jeff Beck might need envied. In distinction, “Girl Love” is the album’s most straightforwardly gnarly rocker and wouldn’t have sounded misplaced on a Unhealthy Firm LP earlier than the album concludes fittingly with extra blistering, distorted blues-rock guitar mayhem on “Little Bit Of Sympathy”.
The tune concepts are sturdy and Dewar’s vocals are impressively sturdy however finally it’s Trower’s virtuosic contact, the nuanced tone of his Strat and the intrinsic ability of the “bends and wobbles” that Fripp so admired on which the success of Bridge Of Sighs rests.
That mentioned, even essentially the most spectacular method can solely take you thus far. Matthew Fisher, one other Procul Harum escapee, was within the producer’s chair however Trower generously attributes a lot of the efficiency of the album’s sonic assault to Geoff Emerick, The Beatles’ legendary sound engineer, who “got here up with a means of recording the guitar I don’t assume had been accomplished earlier than with one mic in shut, one mic within the center distance and one mic set 15 toes away to get the sound of the room.”
Regardless of the techy specs, blues-rock guitar taking part in had seldom sounded so burnished and so incisive. Half a century on, Bridge Of Sighs stays Trower’s excessive level and a pinnacle in guitar pyrotechnics that also dazzles to at the present time.
Extras 8/10: An unedited and beforehand unheard stereo combine, outtakes/various variations of all eight unique album tracks, a stay set recorded for radio through the 1974 US tour plus a Blu-ray disc with Dolby ATMOS and 5.1 mixes.
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