Brian Auger's Oblivion Express
Second Wind

THE REVIEW

Keep a secret: traveling on the Oblivion Express is like indulging in an aerial interrail around the globe. Move the needle, take a step into your carriage and lift your body off the ground. From space, without jolts, everything takes on the right proportions to the eye, you find your equilibrium, your perfect place among the things of the world.

Brian Auger is the Domenico Scarlatti of rock; a forerunner, a reviser of the very concept of “form,” an absolute and supreme genius yet unknown to most. The zany sprite of the Hammond has done all sorts of things in the past: jazz pianist, bandleader, session man with Rod Stewart, Tony Williams, Jimi Hendrix, Eric Burdon, Led Zeppelin, and Sonny Boy Williamson. A colorful smoothie of jazz and pop, R&B with rock, soul with funk, but above all the hands, the mind, and the class of a Style holder. Together with Julie Driscoll, he sets up the Trinity and in 1968 breaks into Top of the Pops with “This Wheel’s on Fire”. Not satisfied, in 1970 he gathers Robbie Macintosh, Barry Dean, and Jim Mullen to take off with Brian Auger’s Oblivion Express.

If the first eponymous album is an absolute masterpiece of perfection, this “Second Wind” registers in the hyperuranium of music. An unstoppable rhythm section, a continuous dispenser of bum-cha-bum, and B3 Hammond dripping everywhere. Perfect balances between the vocal parts and the psychedelic overflow of the groove, in a sparkling carousel of sounds that pass through Miles Davis’s “Live/Evil”, early Chicago, the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Emerson Lake & Palmer, Herbie Hancock’s bounty hunters, and up to Jimmy Smith and Booker T & the Mgs.

The good vibes, eyes closed and heart open to absorb the sound. Because the boundless enthusiasm you should feel for these 6 tracks is proportional only to the quality of your headphones.

Welcome aboard the Oblivion.

See you in the dining car.