Preserve Wildlife: Mama Lion Philips 6369 153

Reviewed by P.F. O'Dea

Even before you pull Preserve Wildlife from its jacket to hear what it's all about, the cover photograph hits you right between the eyes. It pushes the top half of Mama Lion's vocalist at you, together with a large quantity of breast, on which a lion cub is being suckled.

Inside, Mama Lion try to recapture the harsh, jagged feel that worked so well for Big Brother and the Molding Company on Cheap Thrills, and to a certain extern, they succeed. The obvious parallels are there: both groups were/are spearheaded by a loud and raucous female vocalist shrieking out their lines above an equally loud and raucous backing. The crucial difference is that Janis complementted Big Brother, Lynn Carey dominates Mama Lion.

While Cheap Thrills wasn't exactly artistically valid, it was exciting, the group compensating for its lack of technical expertise with the sheer ferocity of its attack. This could also have been the case with Mama Lion had not the stricture of overproduction been imposed upon it. The final result is a backing group that sounds like Big Brother with its rough edges chiseled off.

Miss Carey is in a different place, altogether. From the strident roar that kicks off the opener. "Ain't no sunshine", right through to "Cry" at, the end of the other side, you know she isn't just a pretty nipple. The best example of this is "Wildcat", with its lyric about balling couched in hackneyed words, but it's delivered as if she means it, across a distorted Stooges-type wah-wah backdrop.

Libbers who are tempted to bellow "exploitation" as soon as they clap eyes on the cover will find plenty of food for thought in "Sister, Sister, (she better than a man"), but my personal inclination is towards the pleading Stevie Winwood song, "Can't find my way home", because of the higher lyric standard.