Love - Four Sail
|
List Price: Our Price: $5.97 You Save: $8.01 (57%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $5.96 (click here) Category: Music CD See more new music releases 
|
|---|
Buy this Music CD at online store in your country
Canadian Music Store
Canadian Music Store
Free Music Notes for Four Sail
Free Music Review: Approaches the greatness of Forever Changes, from a different angle
Hit: 4 Stars
Four Sail rocks pretty hard--Arthur Lee's new Love lineup is essentially a power guitar rock quartet. Most of the songs consist of Lee's electric rhythm backed by a pretty tight bass/drums groove, and some up-front, bluesy and often psychedelic lead from Jay Donnellan. Gone are the intricate string, horn arrangements and subtle acoustic textures sharply contrasted with screeching electric guitar that typified the sound of the classic Forever Changes (which probably everyone visiting this page owns). Don't fear--despite the fact that the baroque folk rock sound of Forever Changes isn't present on Four Sail, it's still a really strong album. Overall, it's not the group's instrumentation and the production techniques used that hold the album back from being 5 stars, it's the songwriting, which is uniformly good, just not as transcendently brilliant as Forever Changes (which is a pretty tough set of shoes to fill).
When the songs on Four Sail are good, they're REALLY good--the opener, "August" is ethereal and spacey, rocking in a way that Love's earlier lineup would never have attempted, with some wicked, spiraling lead guitar. Lee's voice is a comfort--despite the difference in musical style, those signature vocals casually drawl out the mysterious, dark lyrics. On first listen, I felt pretty good about the new Love after the first track (I admit it, I was unsure whether I'd be into it). The highlights continue, especially on the hard rockers--"Singing Cowboy" is a well-known Love classic with a stormy ending sequence, and the guitars on "Robert Montgomery" cut with surprising force. A couple of the midtempo tracks are also pretty great--"Talking In My Sleep" is an interesting stylistic detour, and the closer "Always See Your Face" contains some of Lee's classic ironic lyrics.
There are two things that hold this album back from getting 5 stars from me. The first is the lyrics. They're usually pretty good, especially on the aforementioned highlights, but many of them just don't have that magic spark. On Forever Changes, it seemed like Lee was cutting down the curtains that obscure the workings of the world we live in with every ironic, bitter line he spat out of his mouth. With such transcendent, revelatory, and clever lyrics to be compared to, Four Sail's lyrics often don't hold up--where Lee sang about questioning the nature of society's laws and factored mortality into human beings' place in the world on Forever Changes, on Four Sail he sometimes sings about much less compelling (for me) topics like having fun ("Good Times") or friendship and the good old days ("Your Friend and Mine - Neil's Song"). While these are identifiable subjects that most people have experienced, they're pretty pedestrian. Countless people have written these kinds of songs, some better (some much worse, though). Very few people manage to reach the clarity that results in the kind of writing that Arthur Lee produced on Forever Changes. I guess I expected a little more out of the same guy on the next album and was slightly disappointed. However, this is just in comparison with the phenomenal Forever Changes, so it's not a serious problem with Four Sail by any measurement.
The second thing that holds me back from giving Four Sail 5 stars is the relative lack of stylistic diversity. It's mostly blues rock (identified strongly by the lead guitar style), with a few forays into some more psychedelic hard rock (would have liked to hear more of those) and some strutting grooves. Eventually though, a lot of it sounds the same. A lot of "I'm With You" sounds pretty similar to "August," and several of the midtempo jazzier numbers sound like slight tweaks of the same song. I realize that it's unrealistic to expect the cosmopolitan diversity of Forever Changes, I just wish the individual songs on Four Sail sounded a little different from each other.
For all these minor gripes (most of them are in comparison to the incomparable Forever Changes), Four Sail is a strong album and a repeatedly enjoyable listen, and I recommend it to fans of earlier Love. Just keep an open mind--it sounds a fair bit different. Anybody who tells you Love never produced any worthwhile music after Forever Changes is clearly turning a blind eye to some really great material.
Free Music Review: the most underrated love album
Hit: 4 Stars
for some reason this has been the hardest love album to find. now it has been remastered and released with some fine liner notes and cool photos. it's not a great album, it should really be given about a B if you could rate it as a report card. some of the tracks , like talking in my sleep, are pretty weak, despite the fine guitar playing of jay donnellan. nothing is kind of boring, too. and i'm with you, while a pretty good cut, sounds like other songs from their catalogue. like bob dylan, arthur lee occasionally recycled the same riffs and ideas- like on the first album, when love used the same arrangement for both their rendition ofhey joe and their original track my flash on you.songs by the later version of the band were not as good as the first three classic albums, and this is their 4th best record out of the 6 the band made from 1966-70.in contrast, the instrumental skills of the latter members were actually , in my opinion,of a higher degree. donnellan was a superb guitarist, just listen to the smoking leads he plays on AUGUST. ROBERT MONTGOMERY is another classic cut, one of the great tracks in the arthur lee repertoire. SINGING COWBOY also features some killer riffs from lee and donnelan. YOUR FRIEND AND MINE is a catchy, bouncy, old-timey, bluesy ,track dealing with the decesded former road manager of the band, who'd apparently ripped off the band's equipment for drugs. despite this somber subject, it is a likable and cool track. GOOD TIMES is a jazzy number with some more fine guitar work. ALWAYS SEE YOUR FACE is a pretty, orchestrated song that is quite reminiscent of the earlier incarnation of love. and DREAM is an inspirational and spiritual tune with heartfely lyrics and a memorable melody, bassist frank fayad and drummer george suranovich make fine contributions to this gem of a song.
i really think that this album doesn't get enough credit. by no means is it a masterpiece, but it displays a talented, often hard rocking aggregation. the lyrics aren't as awesome as forever changes, which is simply one of the greatest albums of all time, but this stuff is still quite good. i think the later albums do have their moments. as an aside, i saw arthur lee and love perform in cambridge mass. last august, and he's still in fine form. his new band is also good. catch them when and if you get a chance...
Free Music Review: One of the greatest songs of the sixties
Hit: 4 Stars
If you are a fan of Love, you probably already own "Four Sail." Arthur Lee, after Love recorded the classic "Forever Changes," fired the band. There were lots of problems with drugs so he cut everyone loose and started over. When he got together his new band he got an incredible guitarist in Jay Donellen. The songs are a little uneven but generally pretty good. Someone else said that this was the fourth-best of the Love albums. None of their albums were perfect, but this one is pretty good. "August," the opening cut, contrasts Lee's cool, high and pure vocals and his Spanish guitar stylings with the amazingly manic lead guitar of Donellen. This album also has "Singing Cowboy," a Love standard over the years.
But the most important song on this album is the last one, "Always See Your Face." Perhaps it's because it was on the "High Fidelity" soundtrack and has been rediscovered and talked about by rock fans that it has been maybe the biggest "unknown" song of the sixties. In my experience rock fans across Europe seem to have a stronger link to it than here in America. There is something between the simple country-rock arrangement and the horns that come out of left field that lifts the song up; or Lee's beautiful voice that can turn into an incredible soul howl that takes this song over the top. The lyrics are typical of Lee's koans, "I'll always see your face and you'll always see my face. I'm looking at you looking at me." Written down they look like nonsense, but sung by Lee they can open up the mind. Put together this schizophrenic mishmash makes an incredible song that puts a period at the end of Love's Elektra Records period, and the end of an era for the rock scene in L.A. The song, with its horn arrangement, would have actually made a better ending for the previous album ("Forever Changes").
Anyway, "Always See Your Face" is on several other collections of Love material, but if you're a completist and want to hear how the song fits as part of its original album, go for it.
Free Music Review: the anti-forever changes
Hit: 4 Stars
taken in the context of Arthur Lee's recording career up to this album I'm sure many people are forever bummed that Mr. Lee didn't continue in the same vein as De Capo and Forever Changes- In fact, I think that FourSail is a quite brilliant antithisis to those two albums. The recording technique is purposefully lo-fi and muffled compare to the extravagant yet still rugged Forever Changes; listening to the bonus cut of "Talking in my Sleep" and you'll hear that his vision was to make an even more muttled attack, even thicker and distorted than the final product that the records company ended up with.
Another big change was the minamal use of hooks- certainly there are some good melodies, but the songs rely more on the energy of the performance and production value. With a new line-up on hand the music was obviously going to take a change and in the liner notes Arthur Lee alludes that his new bandmates had not entirely respected the folk-rock sound that had made up the previous two Love albums. As he put it he wanted it to be more of a band sound so he wrote the songs around what the other musicians wanted to play and less to what he wanted to say (I think by now he had a pretty jaded view of the business of making music).
There are some really solid memorable songs in here like the urgent August or spiteful Neil's Song, and as a whole the album works quite well together. It would have been interesting to hear what he would have invisioned both production-wise as well as song choices (another thing that is mentioned in the linear notes is that he intended this album to be a double album). I think that this album lines up pretty well with Love, Da Capo, and Forever Changes- it was a definitly a departure, but really it was an inside out anti version of Forever Changes and Da Capo bookends it perfectly.
Free Music Review: LEE'S NEW LOVE
Hit: 4 Stars
There is no way "Four Sail" is better than any of the first three LOVE albums. "Love," "Da Capo," and the masterful "Forever Changes" are unbeatable. They stand as three of the greatest albums in rock history. Period.
That being said, when Arthur Lee emerged in 1968 with a new version of the band, many felt that the chance of another great LOVE album was nothing but a dream. That was totally untrue! "Four Sail" may feature a completely new line-up, but it can certainly stand up to the first three. It doesn't quite match any of them song for song, but it IS a wonderful collection of music overall.
One listen to "August," "Robert Montgomery," "Your Song And Mine - Neil's Song," "Singing Cowboy," and the fabulous "Always See Your Face" proves that Arthur Lee could still write some incredible music - post "classic-LOVE."
This album was released in August, 1969, a month of both love & peace and brutality & murder - in the forms of Woodstock and a creepy little ex-con named Charles Manson. That month love and death stood side by side, forever linked. And once again Arthur Lee and LOVE fit in perfectly with the times that were "forever changing" if you will. A time they were very much a special part of.
"Four Sail" is widely considered the last great LOVE album. Sadly, that is probably true. But it should never be overlooked because it no longer featured the classic line-up. Or because it had so much to live up to by constanly (and unfairly) being compared to the "big three." It rightfully deserves its place among the best LOVE had to offer. This one is well worth the listen.
LOVE on!