ELTON DEAN — The Unbelievable Truth (with The Wrong Object) (review)

ELTON DEAN — The Unbelievable Truth (with The Wrong Object) album cover Live album · 2007 · Fusion Buy this album from MMA partners
4/5 ·
Sean Trane
Whether this is an Elton Dean album or a Wrong Object one is up for debate, but I’m more of a partisan of classifying it with TWO’s discography, because four of the seven tracks are TWO compositions (and therefore “new”, while the three Elton pieces are almost old standards. Nevertheless the two parties had arranged for more than just one session/gig, but Elton’s health would not allow it, since he departed for the big jam session in the naught. They’d had prior contacts and had sent tapes to each other.

Aymeric tells us of the circumstances of this gig, and how the band had barely had anytime at all to set up and no sound-check to play the first half of the gig, as usual, mostly made up of Frank Zappa covers. Then Elton joined them for the second set, and right from the opening Seven For Lee, all madness breaks loose. In many ways, we’re not far away from Soft Machine’s type of fusion during Elton’s tenure in that band, but this is valid for much (if not all) of TWO’s compositions. You’d swear it is Hopper on bass at the start of Millenium Jumble, because it’s a stealing hot Machinist-like number where Elton shines like one thousand sun (Delplancq ans Estievenaert leave him all the space to roam around).

However Dean’s Baker’s Treat is a bit of the odd piece out of the set, since it plays a fairly trad jazz game, and sticks out a bit from the rest of the set. Indeed with Delville’s Unbelievable truth (the title track) we return to fuzz territory worthy of the Machine, and even more. Indeed the track reaches an enthralling intensity, especially during Delville’s lava-melting guitar solo (he’s the band’s main songwriter). Surprisingly enough Cannery Catastrophe is a sung piece, though the vocal parts are so few that it might as well have been an instrumental. But the piece also develops in a wild full-blast blow-out. Elton’s old Basho Variations might just be the evening’s more dissonant piece, but it’s definitely a gentle side, with some slight bop influences.

This album was the last one Elton Dean recorded and in some ways, it’s the perfect testimony of his JR/F side, albeit incomplete, since The Unbelievable Truth doesn’t show his more experimental or extreme facet, but I’m ever so grateful that destiny made that his last album he participated is a great one. Thank you Elton…. And RIP.

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