Fever Dog. Amazing.
I keep trying to start this review of the CD Reissue of Fever Dog’s spectacular 2021 album, Alpha Waves, but my mind just goes into a loop with those three words churing over and over like a washing machine stuck mid-cycle…
I’m calling it amazing because that’s what it is – an amazing mashup of just about everything that’s magnificent about the rock of the seventies, from Floydian noodling, through Kissesque bombast and funky, free flowing fretwork, to out and out pomp rock mayhem… it’s all here. The title track, for instance sounds like the Bee Gees, Earth Wind and Fire, Rush and Steve Miller were forced into a studio and not allowed out until they’d come out with a ‘christ-on-a-bike-that’s awesome’ jaw-dropping classic. Which they did, first take, natch…
Wherever you drop the needle (I know CDs don’t require a needle but just humour me) there’s something to excite and delight. The already-mentioned title track is perhaps the jewel in the crown, but picking a standout example of what makes this band so great when everything on the album is outstanding is a thankless, and ultimately pointless, task. So it’s better, perhaps, to just throw up a few points of interest, like the way Hold On You which sounds like a Simmons/Stanley composition circa 1977 turns mid song into a psych-rock wigout full of parping synths and spacey connotations before a guitar solo that can only rightly be assumed to have issued from the fingers of Ace Frehley erupts from the speakers to restore some sort of sanity. Alpha Waves is that sort of album.
Elsewhere you’ll get whiffs of Steely Dan, Ten CC, T-Rex, Zon… the list of ‘that sounds like!’ moments is endless, but it’s the way that Fever Dog marshall what’s in their brains that makes this such a powerfully effective album. Good singin’ and good playin’, as the blessed Mark Farner might say, can take you a long way, but it’s the other elements of songwriting – ambition, execution, arrangement and sheer madcap ability – that make a record a classic. And Alpha Waves has all of those in spades. This is a spectacular album that you need to hear as soon as possible if you haven’t already done so.
Alpha Waves is out Now.
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