Nucleus - Elastic Rock

I honestly had never heard of Nucleus until a couple of years ago when I heard 'Elastic Rock', which blew me away.  Here was some music that was really right in my sweet spot - kinda jazz, kinda rock, very fluid with some nice improvisational touches.

Led by Trumpeter Ian Carr, Nucleus burst onto the music scene in 1970 with 'Elastic Rock'", their debut.  They proceeded to turn heads at the Montreux Jazz Festival that year, and closed out the year with their 2nd release 'We'll Talk About it Later'.

'Elastic Rock' has a great relaxed groove to it, mining territory somewhat similar to Miles' 'In a Silent Way' (one of my all-time favorite albums).  Relying a bit less on grooves and more on compositions, many of the tracks here flow seamlessly from one to another making the CDs 13 tracks feel more like a couple of extended song-suites.  There's no wankerrific soloing for the sake of soloing here, every note seems to make the right statement, and every solo seems last precisely as long as it should.

The title track floats along dreamily, while "Twisted Tune", based on a pretty simple riff that just sort of expands itself, has moments that remind of early 70's Dead - especially guitarist Chris Spedding's faux-pedal steel sound.  This is probably my favorite track on the CD.  "Torrid Zone" is another strong track, and probably is the closest echo of Silent Way on this album.  But really it's kind of meaningless to pick out favorite tracks here, they way the album was laid out makes it much less a collection of songs and more a cohesive 40 minute work.  It's a shame these guys didn't get more recognition on this side of the Atlantic.

'Elastic Rock' and 'We'll Talk About it Later' were re-released as a two for one package.  'We'll Talk About it Later' is excellent too - well the first 5 tracks are anyway, the last two feature some very ill-advised vocals.  Most of my music listening is done on my computer or on my iPod, but if I were a CD guy I'd take the first 5 tracks of 'We'll Talk About it Later' and burn it on a CD at the end of 'Elastic Rock' - that would be about 75 minutes of killer early fusion.

Elastic Rock:
01. 1916
02. Elastic Rock
03. Striation
04. Taranaki
05. Twisted Track
06. Crude Blues, Pt. 1
07. Crude Blues, Pt. 2
08. 1916 (Battle of Boogaloo)
09. Torrid Zone
10. Stonescape
11. Earth Mother
12. Speaking for Myself, Personally, In My Own Opinion, I Think…
13. Persephone’s Jive