Family
Fearless

Extraordinary band like few others, with a frontman with a voice strikingly evocative of swishes of bad gin, bitter tobacco, obsessions, desires like Roger Chapman, Family reach their peak with this work from 1971, confirming themselves as a premature and personal complex and touching the zenith of artistic maturity.

With John "parsley" Wetton joining (from King Crimson to Wishbone Ash… he played them all) Family gain a solid bassist and an excellent second voice and can create this magnificent album, dense with colors and rich in structures.

The compositions always rest on a solid blues/r'n'r matrix, regarding the sound, but without taking over as in the following albums, "Bandstand" and "It's only a movie" (a failed album and their swan song). The issues present on "Anyway," the previous album, which was a tangible proof of an absolute crisis, are wiped clean.

The listening opens with the sea ballad “Between blue and me”: geographical maps marking loving distances, contrasting emotions (Waves of emotion, sea of joy/Times of sadness and one small boy). It is followed by the extraordinary, Brechtian-Bukowskian "Sat'dy barfly," one of the peaks of Chapman's chameleonic art. Bar tales, random encounters, needs for caresses, and pride of the losers (We're drunk as hell but we're feeling fine/If we leave now then we'll just have time/Where we goin' Louise, your place or mine?). Chappo's throat gargles like a teapot boiling full of nails and bolts.

It is surprising how the same voice transforms into childlike melancholy in the quick sketch of "Larf and sing"; the voice of an old man rejoicing and becoming young again when, in the times left for him to live, he feels renewed in love with his long-time woman, and hence it's a time to "laugh and sing". But now the masterpiece of the album and, perhaps, of the entire work of Family: the baroque, scorching "Spanish tide": at the end of everything, at the end of our questions, there are only stars that are burning. And nothingness. The text is short and poignant, rich in astute images ("Then, quietly the room folds into two/As mirror and window hold the view/Bright on all sides, holding the eye/Leaving, you stand on Spanish Tide").

The near-hoarse and hoarse voice of Wetton appears to sing the first verse of the middle part of the song, which opened with an ironic flamenco intro. The two vocalists then duet on a funk base, making way for the electric piano of Poli Palmer (who plays a fundamental role throughout the album). This is followed by the funk of "Take your partners," and Family briefly returns to the atmospheres of "Family entertainment," their second album. Another side is shown in the tendernesses of "Children": Chappo meows a lullaby, a true chameleon of the vocals; he and Charlie Whitney literally pray to the youth to open their eyes to them. Perhaps the least interesting track on the album, basically a folk/country ballad for a work that instead anticipates many solutions of the forthcoming rock.

"Crinkly green," a 12/8 instrumental is a spotlight for Poli Palmer; he makes his electric piano ring (Wurlitzer?) over an articulated architecture of fugue. "Blind boy" is another moment with a folk imprint; with a strangled tone, Chapman tells a blind and a deaf what is better not to see ("people in pain," "sound of a city near civil war"). A solid track that could escape at first listening, especially as it's followed by the hypnotic chanting of the splendid "Burning bridges," the other peak of the album, where sacred choirs invoke "God's Hoy Fire" and start the blues (Over and over my blues start to roll/Bypass my body head straight for my soul).

While remaining attached to the song format, Family with this masterpiece crack it from within. Their expressive needs foresee the future progressive both for the sounds and for the desire for complexity in forms and contents.

A splendid album for one of the most underrated bands of all time.

…and with the magnificent mask of Roger Chapman