Mad Dog 2002 & Wooden Hill 2008 / Think Like A Key 2024
British country-rock collective bring together two ends of their story to twist it and suggest a Möbius band can stay unbroken.
Shed No Tear
The ability to remain true to artist’s original values and still move with the times is almost as rare as the beast this English ensemble named themselves after. Playing a blend of prairie folk and fairy rock felt par for the course in the early ’70s – interesting enough for David Gilmour to produce their records and cover one of their pieces – but there’s a great distance between Islington and Laurel Canyon, which seemed even greater later in the same decade, when punk’s melodic austerity contrasted neo-hippies’ tuneful opulence the group’s songs hinted at. More so, after their creative peak with 1976’s "Too Many Crooks" wasn’t deemed quite commercial, the following year’s “One More Tomorrow” upped the band’s appeal – and turned them into a liability for both their label and their audience. With no contract, with the crowd at their last concert so small that they had to stop the show, and with plans to cross the ocean falling through, the foursome slowly dissolved – yet not before they laid down an album’s worth of fresh material.
Preserved for posterity in bassist Pat Martin’s garden shed, the fourteen numbers, written mostly by guitarist Ken Baker, demonstrate continuity not only with UNICORN’s four previous full-length platters but also with the tracks the quartet’s earlier incarnation, THE LATE, cut in the late ’60s. A smattering of those, added to this disc to flesh out its context, reveal how the pastoral-industrial likes of “Going Back Home” and “Train Coming My Way” set the scene for the latter-day gems that gathered dust on the shelf – next to such psychedelic and spiritual ditties as “Family Tree” and “Working Man” – for a quarter-century. Their quality is impressive, yet while the sweet, acoustically tinctured “Don’t Want To Go Home Alone” and “Open Sea” simply stood the test of time, and the reggae-tinged “Can’t Stop Thinking About You” and “You Tell Too Many Lies” remain the products of their period, the sublime, electrically driven ballad “Canada’s A Long Way” embraces timelessness without a shade of pretense or effort.
Of course, the humorous, harmonies-filled pastiche “Social Shirker” and the boisterous “Restless” undermine grandeur to a certain extent, and the effervescent “You Can Have A Dream” boasts a rather familiar riff, but the twangy “Rainy Season” offers uniquely upbeat take on the Albion “mustn’t grumble” maxim. All of it is a great extension of the ensemble’s official discography that, until now, has been missing an important aspect: a live performance. Fortunately, this reissue hosts a concert rendition of “Weekend” from 1975 – laid down for a children’s TV programme! A pity there’s no more on-stage artefacts, yet even without those the “Shed No Tear” songs feel precious.
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