Ten Years After
Cricklewood Green

The sound of TYA continues to claim victims, namely myself, as it keeps spreading its dark and sunny poison that expands like a tidal wave, engulfing everything with its pulverizing metonymic purity: Sugar the Road and Walking on the Road obliterate every heaviness and ominous foreboding.

Approximately 40 minutes of wild sound directly from the spring of 1970 and when you press the play button you feel the syncopation that reconnects you to the volatile history of humankind. This heavy 'n' blues soundtrack seems to be the ideal immaterial companion, capable of reconnecting, through generous and immense apotropaic electric discharges, the sky to the ground: and here you are, shot into the Hyperuranium.

An example of this is validated by 50,000 Miles Beneath My Brain which doubles Dear Mr. Fantasy by Traffic. Finally, a tumultuous bass line in the foreground that shares the groove with the upright vocalist, Alvin Lee, before his guitar takes the stage, emotionally threading heaven and hell. A worthy contender of the over-scratching Stones vibe of the late sixties.

If the adrenaline rises dramatically and the soul sets in subtitled, feeling its beat flesh, what is presented to the listener is a radical woogie tonk blues of sure effectiveness (Year 3000 Blues), to then deviate at the next stellar branching into the cosmic cup of jazz blues, dipping the instruments into class and blowing on the fiery fellowship of Me and My Baby, also an expression of ad hoc keyboardism.

We are on the verge of Love Like A Man: 7'41" of robust hard blues declamation where the upheaving rhythm section elevates to a tectonic hypermantra, forming the perfect sound carpet for the layers offered by the trails of Alvin Lee's guitar - the chorus serves to let the song breathe, having now entered the mysterious darkness of galaxies – and you feel it on the epithelial field like a brain spinning there, akin to a rugby ball.

Accompanying the sweet return to Earth, Circles, and the tones lower becoming rustic and bucolic, full of that cosmic dust that clung onto the band during the interplanetary journey undertaken and makes it shine with sparkling strangitude.

As often happens, when you least expect it, just a great record is enough to transport you to happy places where the memory of past sentiments conjugates in the present, adding to the spirit of that providential detachment that translates our staying into a journey… As the Sun Still Burns Away.