Wishbone Ash
The Power Of Eternity

2007: the veteran Wishbone Ash have been on autopilot for some time now, meaning a new album every two/three/four years and live concerts wherever and whenever to finance the recording and promotional activity as well as the small but necessary team of technical collaborators. All this is self-managed by the Powell family, with guitarist Andy at the helm, the only one from the original quartet who believed in the Wishbone Ash project to the end, and still does.

It matters little that, of the current four musicians, one lives in the USA and another in Helsinki: Wi-Fi has now become widespread; for instance, you can instantly transfer .wav files with guitar tracks laid down in Connecticut across the ocean to London, and play them in a studio equipped to have the drummer play over them and obtain a polished rhythm section… The days when Jimmy Page traveled the world with a suitcase full of “reels” containing the basics for the upcoming Led Zeppelin album, trying to complete them in some rented studio between concerts, are a thing of the past.

And this is also an excellent album by the recent Wishbone Ash. To my ears, the excellence among the ten songs it consists of is represented by the third track, “In Crisis,” and, unsurprisingly, for its guitar merits more than its vocals, melodies, or harmonics. The track starts and develops quite normally as a pop-rock mid-tempo, with a couple of verses and choruses neither good nor bad. But from the third minute onward and for a good four and a half minutes, it is almost all guitar solo, interrupted only by a third verse to separate the change between Powell (first solo), and Muddy Manninen (second). An ecstasy! Especially Manninen, who with the final wah-wah tears at the heart.

But there are also other highlights in a work that strangely places the less exciting pieces (excluding “In Crisis”) at the top of the tracklist. The more pop ones, too. I instead prefer to seek out the more epic and refined ones, those around six minutes long, with a nice central instrumental portion where I can enjoy the interplay between the guitars and/or the rhythmic variations of the excellent bass/drum duo.

Such delightful events are found, to begin with, in the rock-solid rock blues “Driving a Wedge,” which miraculously transforms in the middle into an evocative blend of little guitars and big guitars that come out, dialogue, and depart all in a delightful manner. And yet again in another blues “Disappearing,” this time semi-acoustic and atmospheric.

A final mention for the cadenced and “progressive” “Dancing with the Shadows,” which manages to evoke the vocal scents and flavors of the ancient masterpiece “Argus” mixed with a slow boogie pace, a digging guitar arpeggio filled with Leslie effect mixed with blues strokes (the usual Manninen…) in short, the whole shebang that Wishbone can set up almost every time they release something.

It’s the usual four stars of merit: an album worthy of an eight on the report card.