Family
Family Entertainment

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Classifiable in the subgenre "art rock", this album encompasses various genres of music, from cabaret song to swing...

The theme of the album is the passage of time, the beautiful moments that have passed and have now become memories... The Family was formed in 1967 from the meeting of five prodigious and unusual musicians: singer Roger Chapman, a "goat-like" vibrato equipped with an impetuous vocal charge and a thorny boldness, guitarist Charlie Whitney (the main composer of their material), saxophonist Jim King, drummer Rob Townsend, and violinist Ric Grech. The two sides of the album are quite different.

The first, more anguished, manic, and pounding, highlights the rhythmic prowess of the group and Chapman's vocal abilities. Each track follows a coherent development, and the use of exotic instrumentation is very interesting and suggestive even if measured. Instead of many surreal fragments as compared to the previous "Music in a Doll's House," the work consists of solid rock ballads: Weaver's Answer and Hang Up Down are the gems of the violent side of Family, furnaces of fierce rhythm and incandescent lava, syncopated melodies for Chapman's angry vibrato, to whose atmospheres a pyrotechnic arrangement adds a demonic touch (bursts of pastoral flute, jazz saxophone, and serenade violin on the first; medieval guitar and flute on the second).

The raga-vaudeville interlude of Summer 67 (for classical violin, high-pitched violin, and sitar), the paranoid soul-jazz of How Hi-the-li and the relaxed country folk of Observations From A Hill, the masterpiece of the first side, soften the dark shades of this, all played on the contrast between the various aspects of the instrumentation: the folk (percussion, violin, flute), the soul (piano, guitar, voice), the rock (drums, guitar), the jazz (sax, flute, violin), the classical (violin, keyboards).

On the second side, the melody resumes the leading role and the instrumental parts are crafted with formal accuracy worthy of their debut work. In particular, From Past Archives is a renaissance folk (guided by the harpsichord) that borders on a fast '30s jazz (guided by the sax) and a romantic string section. Only Second Generation Woman emphasizes the harder boogie. Processions, a simple melancholic ballad, music for a funeral of ghosts, of memories past, of time that "like a wave drags sandcastles built in childhood into the water", the violin and keyboard performance by Grech and King is splendid: one of the gems of their repertoire, and Emotions, with acid-rock anthem cadences and Caribbean percussion, stand somewhat apart in this feast of imitations and transformations.

Splendid and melancholic are the lyrics as well... However, I will never cease to say that "Processions" covers the cost of the entire album...