It is impossible to define my passion for this style of music, improvisation, being outside the rules, experimenting, composing music different from what was played in those years. Their music is unique, based on the early decades of the last century and contaminated by the seventies' music. The starting point is that, the jazz created by the African-American population, artists like Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, and many others were the fathers of this genre but I won't dwell on it. Meanwhile, in the seventies, the Led Zeppelin held concerts as long as the entire series of "Beautiful"; the Black Sabbath created albums like their eponymous one and "Paranoid," laying the foundations for metal and doom; they took inspiration from the past and drew very little from the music of that period.
I am, of course, talking about my beloved Soft Machine, who in 1973, after a significant revolution regarding the musicians, notably saw the absence of Wyatt on drums and vocals. He was a cornerstone of the group, the man, the genius that made them different, was unceremoniously dismissed and created a rival band to the Soft, the Matching Mole. Now leading the original "soft machine" are Karl Jenkins and Mike Ratledge, who compose "Seven," a fusion album, but the style remains more or less the same as the previous album ("Six"), slower, different from the vibrant "Third" in which Wyatt was obviously present, after his departure from the group, the decline happens. The works with him are easy listening to me, and attention is always alive, in this latest album, already from the second track, it becomes annoying; the scheme is always the same—bass and piano or synthesizer, all played very slowly, no, not cutting it for me. It gives me a strong sense of a forced album without creativity from any of the boys from the Canterbury school; it should be purely experimental, but in reality, you only hear this blessed bass repeating the same old loop throughout the album. They tried to create something different from the previous works but fell into banality, indeed it is quite a boring composition, and if there was something I particularly loved about the Softs, it was their unpredictability, well it is not present here.
In conclusion, this album seems to me decidedly boring and repetitive, I give it three stars only because it is still signed as Soft Machine, and despite their turbulent history, they still managed a work worthy of respect.
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By TheJargonKing
Seven is an underrated work and its significance reaches far beyond merely being a transitional album.
The idea was to create a deadly, hypnotic riff, perfect in its repetition, and build upon it melodies sometimes barely palpable, at other times richer, but always emotional and evocative.