Review of album by Martin Popoff, taken from his book
"
The Collectors Guide to Heavy Metal - Volume 1: The
Seventies"
Max Webster - Mutiny Up My Sleeve
(Anthem '78)
The Max machine keeps ascending further into the bright blue with this
cooler, darker, and mellower release, fashioned sorta like a dry Martini
intravenous. The boys are sounding more like a Steely Dan entombed in
ice, Kim's Strat coming out to play less often and less inflamed,
preferring quieter, intimate moments with the nether bits of the
listener's mind. With respect to the more aggressive cuts, The Party
finds the band in free-form, progressive heaven, closest in acerbic
kinship with Zappa, while Lip Service rides a jagged funk edge through
to its bluesy Fripp-riffed finale. Both hoser anthems became concert
favourites as Max traversed Canada and let squeal its laughing gases
into every nook, cranny and tiny mining town of the band's vast, empty
homeland. Of the mellower material, Astonish Me is the most heartening,
small and jewel-like with Watkinson's Freddie Mercury-poignant piano
stylings leading the star search and wish list. Overall, call this
another fine but disturbed and slightly hostile Max project, one that
finds the band perhaps a bit too self-aware of its oddity yet
comfortable with it, never alienating their strange fanbase, Kim and
troupe offering up what can only be seen as an integral piece of the
band's moonscaped psyche-caressing fuzzy wuzzy puzzle.
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