Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Artist: Wishbone Ash
Label: Golden Core Records
Release: 2011
Length: 65:39
Rating: 4.5/5
Four decades of Wishbone Ash have come and gone. Last year the band played a whole pile of shows to mark the big anniversary. For the occasion they dug through the dusty archives of their rich discography and put together a retrospective set list of the best-known pieces from their classic albums, with the focus on the band’s first decade.
All that intense playing across a nice long string of dates last year got into the guys’ blood and fingers, and the new album “Elegant Stealth” shows it unmistakably. It’s the kind of record that delivers real freshness and quality, with Wishbone Ash “returning” to the time of the excellent studio effort “Bona Fide” from 2002. I’d even dare to say it’s the best Wishbone Ash album of the new millennium, positively bursting with the band’s signature trademarks of musical originality. Four years have passed since the predecessor “The Power Of Eternity”. And that one was very good.
On “Elegent Stealth” Powell and company do what they’ve always done best. This time around, though, it ignites far more convincingly than on the previous album. We’ve already mentioned the first factor: the chemistry in the lineup, which has grown even tighter over the past four years thanks to a heap of live shows. The second big factor is the vastly better production, which sounds as if the band had played a whole concert in the studio. The rhythm section in particular has really opened up on the new album, with playing that’s much more active, witty and sparkling. The guitar interplay sounds warm and organic, the core of the guitar character is still the clean Gibson sound, plus the occasional generous helping of acoustic.
Not only have Wishbone Ash once again laid down a whole bunch of gorgeous harmonies in thirds, they’ve also underpinned them with extra melodic guitar lines, thickening the sonic spectrum of the melody above the guitar riffs. These dual guitar interweavings between Powell and Manninen sound as if they were nailed on the first take and captured on the record just like that. The same goes for the solos. The communication between Manninen and Powell has grown, and the way the two guitar lines flow into each other is outstanding. It’s full of ideas, and the choice of lead melodies rests on clean, classic lines, with none of the solutions that might accidentally hold back the melodic reach of the songs, as you could occasionally sense on the previous album, which is exactly why it didn’t hit as convincingly. The two guitarists approached things with great care and dressed up every available nook and cranny with guitar ornaments. Their precision in coaxing the very best out of that beefy classic Gibson sound is especially fascinating.
The opening track Rreason To Believe says pretty much everything about the album. It opens with a typical Wishbone Ash tune led by harmonies in thirds, surprisingly and contrastingly underpinned by a rhythm close to a “tribal” effect. It’s a thoroughly positive song, with sarcastic verses and an earworm of a chorus backed by vocal harmonies. The band already played this one live back in 2010, then released it as a single and shot a video for it too.
The “poisonous” tracks on the album are Can’t Go It Alone and, later, Heavy Weather. These two pick up the general feel of the album with particular intensity. The harmonic guitar ornaments are even reinforced by violin (Can’t Go It Alone) from guest Pat McManus, which strengthens the Celtic-pastoral effect in the song. The “jam” has always been an essential ingredient of a classic rock band like Wishbone Ash (if you aren’t convinced already, Big Issues with its stretched-out instrumental outro will win you over 100% at the latest). This time both guitarists left the door wide open for room to let loose with their guitars and slip into longer instrumental passages, where, completely unburdened and thanks to their excellent mutual radar, they trade solo motifs or simply each run their own melodic line over the same basic motif. At those points they let inspiration take the wheel. And that’s the winning poker hand of aces for this band’s new record!
In Can’t Go It Alone there’s a moment in the middle instrumental section (at 3 minutes 29 seconds) that once again points to the pioneering importance of Wishbone Ash’s music and the historical value of the musical legacy that Iron Maiden once drew from. When, on the second go-round of the same harmonies-in-thirds motif sitting on a classic 4/4 beat, the drums break into a gallop, that part of the song sounds as if Iron Maiden were playing a stripped-down version of Run To The Hills (read: they forgot to switch on the guitar distortion).
Heavy Weather has a similar design to Can’t Go It Alone, but what really impresses is the integration of woodwinds in the song’s closing crescendo, which boost the mood but sit in an inferior position next to the guitar phrase. Heavy Weather carries one of the most impressively constructed instrumental sections of all the songs on the album, made up of many shifts in atmosphere, and in an almost progressive build-up the band gradually, in the style of old seasoned studio cats, raises the intensity of the ending without losing the red thread of rock compactness for a second.
The songs share an extraordinary flexibility in how the lead motifs are expressed. The allegiance to blues roots is clear (the instrumental Mud-Slick, girded with Airey’s Hammond, expresses it most directly on the album), but Wishbone Ash once again cunningly dress it up as an element of classic melody, and a special building block of the moods is of course Powell’s characteristic vocal delivery with its dreamy, esoteric touch.
Another standout is the spiritual ballad Searching For Sattelites, where the band’s unique feel for detailing fragile harmonic collages of the basic building blocks of the sound really sparkles, crowned by a particularly heartfelt vocal performance from Andy Powell. The atmosphere reaches its full disarming power precisely because this gentle song is played with such careful sensuality. With verses of a peacenik message of revelation, reconciliation with the world around, with everyone, it’s a song of acceptance and letting go, a song of (surviving) artists who (still) understand that the only true path is the path of love. Female vocals are added too, creating the backing harmonies, so the preacher-like connotation of the song is further emphasized. Here and there the guys again added some keyboards to the sound, which really serve only as an inferior, but certainly very welcome, filler. The dynamic development of the songs, though, wouldn’t be possible without the full commitment of the excellent Skeat / Crabtree rhythm tandem, who are getting their full due, their true identity and their true competence with this album. So the band functions as a unit in a super-excellent way. That’s why this album sounds as if it had been played as a studio concert or, to put it more bizarrely: the way Wishbone Ash did it in the seventies. With zero, or the tiniest degree of, distortion of their own authenticity.
12 tracks and a “hidden” one. That’s a remixed version of Reason To Believe, backed by an “old school disco beat” and added vintage synthesizer “loops”. If he’d thrown in some old-fashioned “Barry White” string arrangements too, you’d have a proper “night mix ’80” version for roller-skating around the discos of the early eighties. A fun experiment, but one to be viewed as a completely separate enclave in the musical territory of the new Wioshbone Ash album.
From head to toe, the album doesn’t have a single bad moment. It’s a fully fledged Wishbone Ash album through and through, brimming with inspiration, fresh, with an authentic, organic-sounding tone. Varied in its motifs, but without deviations that would spoil the recognizable trademark elements of Wishbone Ash’s music. If Powell wrote in the liner notes of “The Power Of Eternity” that Wishbone Ash had closed their circle of development with that album, he was undoubtedly wrong, because with “Elegant Stealth” Powell actually contradicted himself. “Elegant Stealth” is the album with which Wishbone Ash have truly closed their circle of development and, after the golden age of the seventies, managed to flirt most authentically and intensely with the primal source of the artistry of their own essence, the one that crowned them giants of rock, above all with the unforgettable masterpiece “Argus” (1972).
Lineup
Andy Powell – vocals, guitar
Muddy Manninen – guitar, backing vocals
Bob Skeat – bass guitar, backing vocals
Joseph Crabtree – drums
GUEST MUSICIANS:
Don Airey – keyboards
Pat McManus – guitar
Production
Wishbone Ash
Track list
1. Reason To Believe
2. Warm Tears
3. Man With No Name
4. Can’t Go It Alone
5. Give It Up
6. Searching For Satellites
7. Heavy Weather
8. Mud-slick
9. Big Issues
10. Migrant Worker
11. Invisible Thread
