Think Like A Key 2026
Harnessing their escapism, English pursuers of fusion pleasures up their ante, tone down their antics and cast their eyes across the ocean.
Hold Your Fire
Album titles rarely are as on-the-money as “Hold Your Fire” – if only any money were involved in this ensemble’s existence – because the British foursome seemed too unrestrained for their own good, and the band’s sophomore offering reflected the performers’ intent to be perceived as a somewhat more conventional collective than their on-stage shenanigans might suggest. Steadfastly refusing to assume a faux-intellectual air in the way various jazz-rock combos used to and opting for straightforward fun, the group still had to appear proper when they set their sights on the opposite side of the Pond where, ostensibly, success lay. That was the reason why not only a special, less quirky cover was designed for the States, but also quite a few pieces on the platter – newly remastered now, with previous reissues’ errors corrected – were given a distinctive American undercurrent, which anchored Ollie Halsall’s six-string wigouts and Mike Patto’s vocal soulfulness.
This much is apparent from the hippie-satirizing titular opener, where the former’s honky-tonk piano and country guitar licks and the latter’s cracked-butter voice conspire to take the listener to the West via several twists and turns, onward, until “Magic Door” closes the record with a spiritual trip by creating an aural equivalent of sweet-incense burning, as the entire ensemble harmonize to lift the vibraphone-splattered ballad off the ground. Yet while “You, You Point Your Finger” adds the darkness of social defiance to its psychedelically tinctured silky intimacy, the bluesy “How’s Your Father” – in which John Halsey’s drums and Clive Griffiths’s bass swell to support Ollie’s fluid fingerwork and Mike’s passionate delivery – wraps sarcasm in a more traditional musical form. There’s deceptively standard rock ‘n’ rolling in “See You At The Dance Tonight” that starts and stops and veers away from the obvious, the rhythm section and the soloists stumbling over each other with the total abandon of professional clowns – especially impressive in the number’s alternative cut, one of the bonus tracks here – and vaudeville swagger rendering many a little detail of “Give It All Away” so alluring.
But then there’s sprawling post-apocalyptic gloom of “Air Raid Shelter,” which demonstrates the collective’s fantastic interplay, a weave of improv-based passages applied sparsely, if hitting hard in their off-kilter bursts, and a hectic, albeit not frantic, momentum to “Tell Me Where You’ve Been” whose robust chords and Appalachia-scented lines turn the group’s American-dream trip inside out. It could go even further into the unknown, as two left-on-the-shelf sketches suggest, “Beat The Drum” sounding otherworldly in the crosshairs of Halsall’s vibes and Halsey’s percussion before revealing the singer’s experiments with jazzy intonation, and “Bad News” shining a light on the axeman’s probing of the tone.
There would be one last offering from the quartet in their original lifespan, “Roll ’em Smoke ’em Put Another Line Out” from 1972, yet if this band didn’t try to hold their fire they couldn’t have burned as fast – and as brightly.
****1/3
