NUCLEUS — We'll Talk About It Later (review)

NUCLEUS — We'll Talk About It Later album cover Album · 1971 · Fusion Buy this album from MMA partners
5/5 ·
Sean Trane
The apex of British jazz-rock fusion so hot, that your speakers will simply melt and your brains will have fried much before that. Un-mistakably the best album of Nucleus but also in the top 5 of all fusion albums including Miles, Mahavishnu etc.... If Elastic Rock (their debut) had given the tone both musically but pictorially also with the incredible Roger Dean cut-out cover of magma/lava about to burst out in the open, it is clear that this album betters it by not one notch but three.

"We'll talk about it later" is somehow not the best title for this album as this is a definitive statement if fusion. The sleeve artwork is again a Roger Dean gatefold cut-out work but not as impressive as the debut but the centre photos is about the Irish uprising in 1916, a recurrent theme in early Nucleus albums (four tracks over the first three albums). The power exudes from every one of these tracks and Bearded Lady , Sun Child , Oasis are incredibly hardcore but nowhere is this so evident than on the title track. In this track , Karl Jenkins saturates his organ to a level that even Banton, Lord, Emerson, Ratledge, Sinclair could not even imagine possible, but Chris Spedding comes in (like he does on the whole album ) with a brilliant guitar, subdued, awesomely restrained, powerful, fearful. In a word: Flabbergastingly breathless performance. The horn players can simply only sublimely accompany the Jenkins-Spedding duo , with John Marshall providing dantesque drumming, Clyne - although trying to add something simply gets drowned out in such a mass of molten and fused lava flowing from your speakers directly into your brains: orgasmic , orgiastic , stupendous!!!!!!!!!!

Side 2 is rather a different as it contains three tracks but Ballad Of Joe Pimp , while revisiting the title track is clearly under its own life with Carr and Smith blowing their horns as if their lives depended on it and the records closes on a Nucleus rarity: A sung track. Easter 1916 is the third time in two albums they revisit the Irish upheaval of the times and that will eventually lead to the Irish independence (well partially anyways as Ulster is still not freed). The lyrics are astounding somehow halfway sung halfway declaimed (almost as if to be disclaimed).

Very poignant end to a superb record, one of my top 5 of all time! Breathlessly beautiful and astoundingly flabbergasting ................words fail me...........Goose bumps and spine chills guaranteed. A must!!! No life can be complete before you heard this at ear-splitting level.
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