Jefferson Airplane
Volunteers

THE REVIEW

A faith in an album, faith in the possibility of change, in the deep will of the individual... words out of date, but perhaps something is regrowing, or at least I hope so. "We can be together" and "Volunteers", real anthems, where the consciousness of the power of music merges with that of consciousness itself. The wah-wah of Kaukonen in "Good Shepherd" pushes you to movement, to action, towards where? Forward, towards the future, start moving. In "Hey Frederick" the enchanting power and the mystical-sexual drive of Grace Slick's voice makes you tremble, you on the other side of the piano and her casting spells on you, plotting on her strings, striking certain keys. Perhaps the peak comes with Crosby's "Wooden Ship", where the three voices of Slick, Kantner, and Balin alternate, caress the ship like a sea breeze and then unite and are seastorms and hurricanes. Leaving you shaken.

But go beyond just the simple listening to the songs as it comes naturally: a look at the style and the quality of the songwriting, the cleanliness of the recording, the production, the instruments, and the musicians' executive and inventive capacities. In the case of "Volunteers", already all these things are exceptional. Let's go further. Let's talk about the sound, as we can talk about a chemical combination, of a very particular alchemy: HERE lies the magic of the album. The sound is not form, but purest substance, dazzling. It becomes vibrant matter, molten steel, relentless but life-giving lava; it burns you, flows through you, and damn it, it can't, I mean it can't leave you indifferent. Brutal force, you want it to conquer and ravage you, you want it to defeat and humiliate you but you don't want it not to notice you. You want to shiver beneath it, capitulate under its incalculable measure. Beyond the songs, there exists a sound, a physical and spiritual amalgam. It no longer surprises me that Benicio Del Toro in the film "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" wanted to die electrocuted in a bathtub by throwing the stereo playing an Airplane cassette with "White Rabbit" at the peak into the water. The expressive power of this sound lies in its precise meaning and at the same time in the possible unhinging of all the senses. Only a few bands have had this. A group of people determined to do it, to make you tremble, shake you.

This art here is at the peaks of its expression. Dazzling.