Steel Mill
Green Eyed God

LA RECENSIONE

Turn off all the lights in your room, light some scented candles, and get comfortable while listening to the record. Five unknown English musicians (singer Dave Morris, flautist and saxophonist John Challenger, guitarist Terry Williams, bassist Jeff Watts, and drummer Chris Martin), about whom there is a confessed total lack of any information, recorded the album in 1971, which would only be released 4 years later.

The splendid cover immediately gives some clues about the album's content: it is an unusual heavy prog with spices of world music and psychedelia (imagine a mix between Jade Warrior, Led Zeppelin, and Black Sabbath, and you'll have a good idea of what it's about), very diverse and rich with sudden changes in tempo and atmosphere. The recording and production are certainly not the best available at the time and at times use some clever strategies that are little more than artisanal but effective (for example, the flute parts recorded in the studios' toilets: it sounds incredible, but they give something extra to the instrument, thanks to the strong echo that almost makes it seem made of bamboo), but absolutely do not detract from the final result.

Williams' guitar, wandering between hard, psychedelia, and exoticism, is the true backbone of the band, never banal or intrusive, and it never indulges in gratuitous virtuosity typical of the era, but is always and only at the service of the songs, compensating for the lack of keyboards (except in two tracks where there is a piano played by Morris) creating, in addition to the usual wall of notes, magical and dreamy atmospheres. Atmospheres on which Challenger, a wind player closer to world music than true jazz, gives his best, appropriately choosing the flute during the more dreamy parts and the sax during the harder ones. The flexible and crystalline voice of Dave Morris, also a pianist, as mentioned, in a couple of tracks, tops it all off, always pleasant and never out of place. The powerful, precise, and sometimes imaginative bass of Watts and Martin's adaptable drumming ensure a rhythmic base always adequate to the pieces, without a single off-note throughout the 42 minutes of the record.

The almost ten minutes of the title track encapsulate all the art of the group: after a tribal and ethereal start led by the flute, the song quickly shifts towards a series of decidedly hard riffs, on which sax and guitar improvise tastefully, then return to the initial theme. All this is enhanced by Morris' excellent vocal performance and held together by the rhythm section, which doesn't miss a beat during the long journey. The rest unfolds between the marvelous hard riff with strong Middle Eastern spices of the opener "Blood Runs Deep," the ballad "Turn The Page Over," one of the two tracks with Morris on piano (the most canonical track of the album, still never syrupy or banal), the Sabbathian hard of "Treadmill," introduced by the unusual muezzin-like vocalizations of the singer, and "Har Fleur" the brief concluding flute solo.

Highly recommended to every fan of 70s progressive rock bordering on hard rock (the most fitting comparison is with early Jade Warrior), a small hidden masterpiece buried by the crowded market of the time and the considerable delay in the album's release.