Sunday, 5 August 2012
If I had the time, energy and inclination I suppose I could trawl back through eighteen months of Mojo and Uncut in search of the reviews that prompted me to buy this album, but, really, all that exercise would achieve would be a name to add to a list of reviewers whose sensibilities don’t quite coincide with mine.
There was a time, back in the late sixties and early seventies, when I had a list of reviewers whose tastes dovetailed rather neatly with my own, and while most of the names have faded into distant memory Ian Macdonald (author of The People’s Music and Revolution In The Head: The Beatles Records and the Sixties) and Richard Williams were two I recall as being particularly reliable dudes who pointed me towards some great music.
Ultimately, however, setting out to compile a list of reliable reviewers would involve much more effort than a quick skim looking for reviews of The Gathering.
That hearkening back to the early seventies should come as no surprise because a couple of bars into the opening track (The White Ship) I found myself cast back into the realms of heavyhanded plodding riff merchants that I didn’t have much time for back then and have successfully managed to avoid for much of the intervening forty years.
A bit of basic research reveals The Gathering is Arbouretum’s fourth album, and is allegedly based on singer-guitarist Dave Heumann's exploration of themes from Carl Jung's Red Book. The reader may guess that Hughesy’s reaction to the album under review here stems from the Jungian factor with the accompanying exploration of the collective subconscious and archetypes, but while I’m not that big on grandiose concepts (Yes, and Tales of Topographic Oceans, for example) it ain’t the concept that’s the problem here (as far as I’m concerned, anyway).