MoonJune 2006 / 2025
Floating World Live
And then there were five: flaunting unfamiliar fusion fantasies in front of audience, Canterbury’s finest take flight.
It had taken these adventurers about eight months to incorporate a full-member guitarist into their ranks to become a quintet and lay down a new album, yet "Bundles" wouldn’t see the light of day for the same period of time after they did: no wonder, then, that on the day their platter hit the shelves, the ensemble were already on the road, performing fresh material. What’s surprising, though, is that a document of the band’s tour survived where, perfectly captured in January 1975 for a Radio Bremen broadcast, the collective sound invigorated enough to not rely on earlier line-ups’ material without betraying their sonic identity. An almost impossible task, but the group pulled everything off with rare elegance and aplomb.
Showing no mercy in terms of treating listeners to previously heard tunes, the English team soften such shock by offering savory arrangements which offset the tentative grandeur of many a number on display. Onwards, from the titular instrumental that unhurriedly emerges from the weave of Mike Ratledge and Karl Jenkins’s ivories to get punctuated by Roy Babbington’s bubbling bass and caressed by John Marshall’s cymbals before Allan Holdsworth’s energetic axe passages cut “Bundles” into a series of deliciously rocking and finely filigreed figures, there’s hardly a moment not imbued with awe. For the most part, the musicians don’t allow themselves to break the flow with a pause between pieces, so “Land Of The Bag Snake” only swells to push further the electric envelope of the already existing dynamic scope and make it physically substantial, yet still atmospheric.
This is why “Ealing Comedy” has to provide a respite, if not exactly relief, in the form of a four-string extravaganza: to cleanse the audience’s palate for the violin-elevated melancholy of “The Man Who Waved At Trains” – Allan rarely handled the bow, but when he did, the effect was hair-raising – and “Peff” which reaches out for frantic rapture. It ends up disintegrated in “North Point” that knots disparate synthesizers’ strands into a spaced-out trip to tracks like “Hazard Profile, Part One” which are more defined in their powerlifting glory, and even the 10-minute drums solo “J.S.M” can’t stop the momentum until “Riff III” goes for mighty ‘n’ merry funk. However, there’s different, sensual air to “Song Of Aeolus” that rides a romantic piano line and features quasi-accordion, while “Endgame” gains the speed of light and brightness of lightning once again, leaving “Penny Hitch” to slowly bring things to a close in a pensive, soothing manner.
A revelatory recording.
*****
