Label: Warner Strategic Marketing (Germany), 8122 73640-2
Style: Garage Rock, Psychedelic Rock
Country: Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Time: 50:07
Format: Flac Tracks 16/44,1 kHz
Size: 329 Mb
The last Elektra studio album. I like to think of it as Love’s final album, period; since to me they are ‘Elektra Records’ and all the good things that once meant, personified.
Preceeded as it was by the towering, glittering, haunting and mysterious ‘Forever Changes’, it’s always been easy to overlook ‘Four Sail’. To mod sixties dressups, it doesn’t have the stylishness of the first two Love LPs. To fans of Forever Changes, it’s pretty much entirely without horns and acoustic guitars. Furthermore, Bryan MacLean’s gone, along with the entire original lineup (except for Arthur Lee). To many people, that’s been enough to consign it to the obscure end of an already ‘obscure-ish’ band’s catalogue.
But I have come to regard it as Love’s other masterpiece. The fuzzier, grittier, jammier side of Arthur Lee’s mystical ‘Forever Changes’ LA muse.
Four Sail is indeed a beguiling record. Its opener, the rumbling roiling ‘August’ at once features those familiar, inimitable Arthur Lee chordal stylings…mesmerizing quasi-flamenco, fat Gibson fingerpicked arpeggiations. His singing is high and stately again. His Forever Changes ‘Johnny Mathis’ voice. The jagged bark of ‘Stephanie Knows Who’ is now 2 whole albums away (but wait! We’re only on the first song). Newcomer Jay Donellan is a great lead guitarist, perhaps the best that Lee ever worked alongside (save for one other, of course). His leads are like a fluent Neil Young: All pining upper registers and countrified triplets. It works and gels as ‘Love Guitar’ though. He clearly knew what band he was joining. The song is ‘August’ in music. Thunder season. Hot & humid. High pressure. Maybe a little burnt out. It’s a Love classic.
(full version: headheritage.co.uk/unsung/reviews/love-four-sail) Review by banjo, Jan 2006ce
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