Label: Phil Lanzon Ditties/Cargo Records UK
Release date: 02.08.2019
Produced by: Simon Hanhart
Album length: 55.20 min
Genre: Art Rock
Rating: 10 / 10
Phil Lanzon is an incredible musician. His long career has no shortage of projects, but the standout is his now-evergreen 34-year stint with the ultimate rock legends Uriah Heep. So it’s pretty remarkable that until last year Lanzon hadn’t put a single solo studio album on his résumé. Why should anyone care, in the end? Because both of them are, frankly and without a shred of modesty, excellent.
The artistic elegance of this many-sided artist’s creativity has proven hugely important, if not downright essential, to the songwriting in Uriah Heep. It’s precisely thanks to Lanzon’s “progressiveness” that the band has stayed interesting and even kept growing artistically since Lanzon and Shaw jumped aboard in 1986. Last February Lanzon released his solo studio debut »If You Think I’m Crazy« and absolutely blew people away with it. Barely a year and a half has gone by, and here’s the follow-up, no less thrilling, called 48. Seconds. Made in forty-eight seconds. Well, not quite. Clearly the ideas piled up and got filed away over the years, and now they’re finally creeping out into the light, ready to expand to their full size.
»48 Seconds« really is a superb piece of work in every respect. It’s all in there. The label art rock is too loose. This is a stunning genre fusion, where Phil’s classical musical training, a theatrical, film-score-style approach to arranging (which is also why he brought Richard Cottle on board) and, of course, rock all shake hands perfectly: classic hard rock above all, plus AOR and, naturally, progressive rock.
With a record this rich in ideas, it’s hard to boil it down to a short text. Let’s take a quick run through the contents. The instrumental opener sets off into a mystical atmosphere and would make a great backdrop for a film (hence the collaboration with Richard Cottle). Next comes the rocker In The Rain, which wins you over completely with its AOR melody and has verse arrangements in the vein of Ten. Then the album drops into one of its most ambitious moments, Forty Line, where Lanzon perfectly blends hard rock and progressive rock with the theatrics of prehistoric chanson from the days of Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra. This uplifting, positive-minded track has woodwind arrangements woven in that sound like they sneaked in from the days of American Prohibition. Rock N’ Roll Children is a track where elements of neo-prog rock, typically found only on the British Isles, meet the kind of arrangement choices the Flying Dutchman Arjen Anthony Lucassen makes with Ayreon. Whenever Lanzon hits the Hammond lines on the album, your mind jumps straight to Uriah Heep, of course, and if we’re looking for the closest points of kinship with the legends, they’re Look At The Time, with its perfectly seductive AOR chorus, and above all the riff-sharpened You Can Make A Living, where the brilliant, dynamic contrast of melodic bass lines takes over and the track hits a crescendo in a chorus loaded with choral vocal harmonies. Both songs are marked by a clear prog-rock approach. Smack in the middle of the album comes another artistic detour, delivered by Road To London, where Lanzon captured a grandiose atmosphere of mystique amid playfully woven Celtic folk arrangements, which the strings bring into this melancholy, yearning song. Still, next to Forty Line, the closing piece takes first place on the album for compositional ambition. It’s an almost ten-minute (neo-)prog-rock feast, a mini-epic art-prog-rock symphony that also gives the album its name, and whose arrangement was actually inspired by the earthquake that hit San Francisco in 1906. This is the track that sums up all of Phil Lanzon’s splendid artistic sophistication in one place, and on the new album he also tries his hand at lead vocals again (Face To Face). The track 49 Seconds is full of unexpected compositional twists, full of building and shifting moods, a song that unfolds through an unexpected sequence of motifs. Still, it’s clear Lanzon doesn’t indulge for a second in artsy “weirdness” that would fragment a composition. Every section of every song has a head and a tail, with carefully built transitions and bridges. The track 48 Seconds is, to this day, Lanzon’s most ambitious work of his career. So much for “in short” on the material. It’s clear that the album traps an eclecticism within it, and that the mystique and mystery of its often grandiose, bombastic moods, which it summons to life so masterfully, can even be compared to the work of Alan Parsons, or the Alan Parsons Project.
All this and more proves that Phil Lanzon kept all these gems of his hidden away in the archives for far too long. Now they’ve finally found their way to shine at full intensity. Two top-notch solo studio albums in under two years. Excellent production, and wonderfully rich, varied arrangements that grab you greedily and keep you hooked in their captured moods. »48 Seconds« is a perfect blend of captured musicality and moody theatrics.
The new album keeps up the outstanding quality of its predecessor »If You Think I’m Crazy« and, if anything, surpasses it in quality. Surely the ideas on it are several years old.0. The gap between the two is too short for a composer to reach this kind of perfection within a little over a year across two consecutive studio albums. You have to keep in mind that Lanzon is constantly touring with Uriah Heep, and that a new Uriah Heep studio album also came out between his two records, which is once again considered one of the band’s best, if not outright the best, post-millennium achievements.
There’s something else, though. Lanzon and Simonon Hanhart have known each other for a very long time. In the second half they founded the band Romance, which fell apart very quickly, but in that time managed to put together a demo of four original songs and who knows how many ideas have been sitting in Phil Lanzon’s archives from then until today.
In every respect, »48 Seconds« is the very definition of artistic brilliance, a record you can’t add a thing to or take a thing away from. A perfect, flawless piece of work.
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Track list:
01. Azura’s Theme (Instrumental)
02. In The Rain
03. Forty Line
04. Rock N Roll Children
05. Blue Mountain
06. Look At The Time
07. Road To London
08. You Can Make A Living
09. Face To Face
10. 48 Seconds
Lineup:
Phil Lanzon – keyboards, vocals
John Mitchell – vocals
Andy Makin – vocals
Richard Cottle – keyboards, saxophones
Neal Wilkinson – drums
Adam Goldsmith – guitar
Mick O’Donohue – guitar
Laurence Cottle – bass guitar
Miriam Grey – vocals, backing vocals
Phoebe Street, Andy Caine, Andy Playfoot – backing vocals
Tom Walsh – trumpet
Clare Mcinerney – saxophone
Neil Sidwell – trombone
Chris Haigh – violin (solo)
Richard Harwood – cello (solo)
Levine Andrade – viola (solo)
London Telefilmonic Orchestra – first and second violin, viola, cello, double bass
