Label: BMG Rights Management (UK) Ltd
Release date: July 31, 2020
Production: Steve Howe
Album length: 43.25 min
Genre: Progressive Rock
Rating: 7.0/10
Among other things, Steve Howe has aced every exam on how to make a bad album over the course of his career. An unwelcome opening line, but it turns out to be the “red thread” of this piece. A revered guitarist, one of the most respected out there, who by joining one of the essential bands of progressive rock’s pioneering days in 1970 slowly started showing just how many different and untested musical expanses rock could still absorb, becoming even richer, more challenging and more inspiring along the way. Steve Howe is still considered one of the main players in shaping and founding the progressive rock genre, and to put it bluntly, his contribution is, all things added up, a major factor in how rock’s developmental spheres expanded in the first half of the seventies.
Funny thing, though: by the time of the Yes album “Relayer” (1974), the man had already shown his entire repertoire and the bulk of his guitar tricks and “shenanigans.” His style and sound became cemented and recognizable from a mile away, the foundation on which the musical record of any band he’s in rises and falls (Yes, Asia, GTR and ABWH too), as well as the solo albums Steve has put out quite a lot of over his career. But since the mid-seventies, the man hasn’t moved any further artistically. Nor has he surprised much on the ideas front, even though a few of his studio albums are thoroughly praiseworthy. The instrumental ones. That’s worth stressing as we turn to the latest effort by “Mr. Owl” – the nickname the legendary guitarist’s looks have earned him among cheeky fans – called “Love Is.”
So instead of Howe, Steve has briefly become Steve Love. And what is love to Steve Howe? Absolute inner peace and generating immaculately positive vibes that make the whole neighborhood bloom instantly and turn even the most furrowed, sullen brows into a synonym for blissful catharsis. Maybe so. Especially when you add that the man has been practicing transcendental meditation for years, completing his persona with it every day, and ate his last steak on the American leg of the Yes tour in 1972. That worked well in the Yes days, the old days, but nowadays, and especially over the last fifteen years, you’d wish Howe would order a medium steak at a restaurant once in a while. This excessive chilled-out-ness shows in the abundance of sing-song melodies that fill the latest “post-Anderson era” Yes albums, and also his studio albums and “left over” material albums released in his “Homebrew” series, which feel very easygoing and give the impression that “Mr. Owl” is pretty quickly satisfied with the creative reach of his latter-day songwriting. Not least, this is reflected in “Nexus,” the joint album with his late son Virgil, which Howe wrapped up very sloppily (in the producer’s role too).
“Love Is” is another such album of mixed feelings. It has ten tracks. Five are instrumental, five vocal. The moment the album opens with Fulcrum, it’s clear who’s with us. A subtle fusion of serenely and cerebrally-esoterically measured tones, laced with occasional jazzy “fingerstyle” figures and a light, even playfully sunny, Celtic sentiment of mysticism, which marks Howe’s distinctive guitar playing. It’s all here. From a whole constellation of “exotic” stringed instruments, steel guitar and twelve-string acoustic to the organic sound of the priciest semi-acoustic guitars. That’s what the opening instrumental Fulcrum paints. Steve played bass guitar (on the instrumental tracks) and contributed keyboards. In short, he gave the album a lot of time. Polishing the arrangements.
Five tracks are vocal. Sadly. The bigger irony is that current Yes singer Jon Davison appears on the album as backing vocalist. It would’ve been better the other way around, with Howe providing the backing vocals, but then the album would’ve come too close to the current Yes. As it is, Howe’s droning simply mangles half the album. So yes. “Love Is” would in this case also mean Howe’s boundless love of singing, which nothing can stop. And, as a consequence, a drop in the quality of the tracks you put on the record. The peak of this sappiness, if not outright pathos, which at moments feels downright forced, is the vocal Imagination, which Howe dedicated to his “cutie-pie” granddaughter Zana. Of the vocal tracks, Love Is A River has the most potential, appealing in its arrangement as the most “progressive” of the bunch.
“Love Is” does have some really lovely artistic potential. Especially if Steve Howe didn’t sing on five of the album’s tracks. But the man decided otherwise, and that’s fair enough, since artistic freedom dictates it. The hope of getting something like what even “Spectrum” (2005) radiated turned out to be an utopian, empty pipe dream, the grumbling of an incorrigible fan of good old Yes, which only confirms that time has run over not just Steve Howe but also the reviewer of this piece, who will happily keep going back to Howe’s first three studio efforts in the future. Steve Howe devotees will thus unconditionally add this album to their collection; everyone else will tread carefully and read between the lines among those efforts on which this otherwise highly respected musician radiated more ingenuity, creative bite and appealing, experimental self-challenge. Apparently even too much love, the downright superfluous kind, can do a bit of damage now and then.
Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Tracklist:
01. Fulcrum
02. See Me Through
03. Beyond The Call
04. Love Is A River
05. Sound Picture
06. It Ain’t Easy
07. Pause For Thought
08. Imagination
09. The Headlands
10. On The Balcony
Lineup:
Steve Howe – guitar, pedal steel, keyboards, vocals on tracks 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10, bass guitar on tracks 1, 3, 5, 7 and 9
Jon Davison – backing vocals and bass guitar on tracks 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10
Dylan Howe – drums
