Blow by Blow: Jeff Beck

Epic SBPC 474 304

Reviewed by Patrick O'Dea

Jeff Beck's back with an all-instrumental album, Blow By Blow, after a two-and-a-half year absence, and that's great, I think, because if you've been playing for more than 10 years you either manage to pick up more than a modicum of expertise along the way or get stomped in the shuffle. So I gave Blow by Blow an initial dozen listenings and remember being disappointed by the apparent blandness of most of the proceedings. Sure, Cause We've Ended as Lovers sounds like where Caravanserai should have been before Carlos Santana freaked out on Sri Chimoy and excluding the com like 'It Doesn't Really Matter' (as its listed on the label) or 'You Know What I Mean' (on the jacket), there really wasn't that much there that grabbed ahold of the listener as Beck's playing can do forcing him to sit up and watch carefully.

So when the aforementioned It Really Doesn't Matter - You Know What I Mean, the opening cut on side one, stopped pushing me out of the room whenever I put it on the record player, I could sit down and concentrate. I emerged thinking it doesn't really have a single track as potent as Over Under Side-ways Down or Shapes Of Things. The material is not up to the best that Beck has performed nor is it eight versions of Love is Blue as some record world cynics would have it. Blow By Blow's impact expands with repeated hearings, while its few shortcomings recede proportionately. It Really Doesn't Matter takes the band through several changes, into the fascinating She's A Woman. Energetic rhythms bounce up and down against Beck's ethereal guitar lines and explode towards a startling, double-timed climax. He manages to pack more ideas into two lines than most guitarists could find space for in a solo. Constipated Duck features Stevie Wonder's synthesizer counter-pointing Beck's manic wah-wah - it's a strange juxtaposition of titles on this first side, and in this case I can only assume that Beck means it as a tribute to his recently deceased dog. In its wake Air Blower - a jam named for the London studios where the album was produced-and Scatterbrain feel slightly leaden. An adroitly executed coda rounds the side out neatly.

Cause We've Ended As Lovers brings to life a haunting stellar vision with Beck's licks [unclear: t] silhouetted against a backdrop of tight group work. It was written by Wonder and is dedicated to Roy Buchanan, who, along with Link Wray, remains one of the classier undiscovered guitarists. Wonder also write the next track Thelonius, a tone poem in honour of the legendary jazzman, and turns in more bubbling synthesiser. Freeway Jam becomes a little bit pointless, but if there's crisper drumming anywhere else, recently, then it hasn't found its way to my turntable. 'Diamond Dust,' the closing track is a further venture in 'the spectral palaces of the mind' type genre, except this time more evocative of caverns beneath the sea than arid lunar landscapes - a genuine (surprise) expansion of the electric guitar's vocabulary. George Martin's orchestration provides just the right touch and segues into a languid, almost relaxed guitar-electric piano duet and back out again into the string arrangements. It's the cap for an album that despite its flaws and its purely instrumental nature manages to produce the goods more consistently than most of the albums released this year.

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