WAR — The Black-Man's Burdon (review)

WAR — The Black-Man's Burdon album cover

Album · 1970 · RnB

3.5/5 · 2011-04-23
Sean Trane

If the group’s debut album had an arresting title, the sophomore effort had a no-less intriguing and amusing one, but when one realizes this is a double album, the title is maybe not so ironic after all. But, behind the impressive contre-jour artwork and unchanged line-up, the double album has a lot of lengths and sometimes ill-advised covers, but the fact is the Eric Burdon was an unpredictable man and with his group, they DARED!! Yes, they dared doing things and were certainly not concerned with playing it safe, with Burdon sometimes being as crazy as Captain Beefheart’s Don Van Vliet.

The A-side is almost entirely filled up with an improvised 13-mins Paint It Black version (certainly the Stones’ most covered song). That takes up the first seven tracks on the Cd version and is rather impressive, because the band always falls back on their feet, this without sounding over-rehearsed. The other song is a 8-mins+ Spirit track is another highlight with plenty of excellent musical passages and tempo changes over a subtle blues beat. Opening the B-side is New Born Child, rising out of nowhere, but adopting an almost grotesque blues that is transformed into a gospel track… certainly not a bright idea. Then comes one of the most daring cover they’ve tried: The Moody Blues’ Night In White Satin, slowed down even more than Vanilla Fudge would’ve done it, and broken into two parts to allow a few improvs such as the Bird and The Squirrel, respectively (and grandiosely) represented by the flute and the congas, before segueing into Nuts, Seeds & Life with a bass solo then a bass/drum duo, before dying and re-growing Out Of Nowhere, although there are lengths, the track veers into a Burdon tirade between Morrison and Van Vliet and finishing the disc on the closing part of the White-Satined Night. In itself the classic hit War rework can shock, the same way Burdon will doing the Beatles Day In The Life or the way Vanilla Fudge did with plenty of hits, but both War and VF can send chills in your spine with their dramatics.

The second disc opens on a 10-mins Sun/Moon, a lazy organ-laced blues that takes its sweet time to rise out of bed, but only to return to bed once it has reached the bathroom sink. A sleeper and a snoozer. The following Pretty Colours is a piano-driven mid-tempo funk where Miller’s sax answer’s Burdon’s wails, but again the group almost loses itself a bit, before catching up in a superb multi-vocal rap. At almost 7 minutes, it could’ve been shortened by a full minute without hurting the superb bridge leading in Gun, a superb mid-tempo bluesy-funk where the band plays it tight for a change and the works on the vocals is again impressive. The final D-side opens with another deep blues Jimbo, but in the Cd version, you’d swear this was still he same élan War had in gun. Jimbo is a slow developing track gradually picking speed and spite, but losing it all for its predictable lengthy agony. Just too predictable and wasting some vinyl space. The following Bare Back Riding will remind you ZZ Top’s La Grange (or Have Mercy), but we are three years before, so we know who invented that bluesy riff with Oskar’s excellent harmonica. After a tedious Home cooking, the album closes on Can’t Take Away Our Music, a positive and unexciting tune, again overstaying its welcome.

Well maybe a double Lp was a bit too ambitious for Eric and his bandmates, as they run of steam after the third side; and even then, most of the tracks on the previous sides were also needlessly elongated. Overall this second album might even be better than the debut in terms od sheer mass of good songs, but par capita of time, it pales in comparison. Still worth a listen, but you’d better rent it and make your compilation.