Label: Castle Classics (UK), CLACD220
Style: Hard Rock, Folk-Hard Rock
Country: Dunfermline, Fife, Scotland
Time: 35:01
Format: Flac Tracks 16/44,1 kHz
Size: 229 Mb
Exercises indeed. This album is the weirdest anomaly in the entire Nazareth catalog (at least, the entire Seventies Nazareth catalog), as there's nary a heavy rocker to be found anywhere. Even hardcore Naz fans sometimes raise an eyebrow here, but I say swell. If anybody were going to accuse me of "always expecting something from a band and then condemning them when they try and make something different", here's a good chance to disprove this accusation. This is the most untypical, anomalous, chronologically displaced, genre-irrelevant Nazareth record ever; and yet, it is one of their best, even if it's nowhere near as perfect as the debut album.
What happened here is that Nazareth tried going in a far softer, laid-back direction. This stuff is not exactly "soft rock", because it doesn't have that safe, homey feel most soft rock creations have, but it completely lacks the band's traditional mountaineer grittiness. Orchestrated ballads, country-western tunes, Scottish ballads, conventional folksey ditties... not a heavy metal tune in sight. Well, only one, maybe, which is the band's hilarious bluesy rocker 'Woke Up This Morning'; but it's essentially a novelty tune, continuing the line of 'Fat Man' from the last album. It kicks some ass, to be sure, but its biggest attraction by far are the lyrics ('woke up this morning, my dog was dead/Someone disliked him and shot him through the head/Woke up this morning, my cat had died/I know I'll miss her, sat down and cried' and so on). The melody is kinda trite, awesome guitar solos though.
(full version: starlingdb.org/music/nazareth.htm)
01. I Will Not Be Led (03:08)
02. Cat's Eye, Apple Pie (03:07)
03. In My Time (03:28)
04. Woke Up This Morning (03:10)
05. Called Her Name (04:33)
06. Fool About You (02:50)
07. Love Now You're Gone (02:29)
08. Madelaine (05:59)
09. Sad Song (02:17)
10. 1962 (Glencoe Massacre) (03:55)
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