Deep Purple
Now What?!
Eagle Records
2013
You can’t call this album a comeback, because Deep Purple never actually left. 7 years after “Rapture of the Deep” and featuring a near-classic lineup of vocalist Ian Gillan, guitarist Steve Morse, bassist Roger Glover, drummer Ian Paice and keyboardist Don Airey, Deep Purple explore their rock-blues roots and offer their fans yet another good album.
The title of the first track, “A Simple Song”, in my opinion is representative of Deep Purple’s intentions for this album. “Now What?!” is “a simple album” with no surprises, no aces up its sleeve and deprived of any pretentious pompousness whatsoever. OK, there might be a bit of pompousness in (the almost Emerson, Lake & Palmer sounding) “Uncommon Man”, but it’s not pretentious, it’s the good kind, the Deep Purple kind.
The good thing with bands like that is the fact that they couldn’t care less if their record features a radio friendly hit or not. The same thing is obvious in the case of “13”, the new Black Sabbath album. After all those years and hits they are have earned the right to be free to just compose the kind of music they feel like playing. “Now What?!” is definitely an easy-going record rooted deeply in 70’s era hard and blues rock, but with a few interesting surprises here and there.
I mean on the one hand, you have your clean cut old school hard rock songs like: “Weirdistan”, “Body Line” and “Hell to Pay”, as well as your soft and melancholy rock ballads such as: “Blood from a Stone” and “All the Time in the World” but on the other hand, you also get some really interesting elaborate dark virtuoso tunes like: “Out of Hand”, “Uncommon Man”, “Apres Vous” and “Vincent Price” in which you just hear a bunch of old dogs ready to experiment and prove that they know exactly what they’re doing without ever showing off once again.
The truth is that you don’t judge an album by Deep Purple the same way you judge any other. I mean, no one expects a band which was formed way back in 1968 to start trying out new kinds of music. Even if the organ sounding keyboards may be a bit outdated and, at times, plainly funny to someone born within the last 15 years, how weird, not to mention pointless, would it be if Deep Purple decided to give post-grunge a go? When you play a Deep Purple record you expect to hear the kind of music that Deep Purple are known for. But, since this Deep Purple record came out 45 years after their formation, it almost goes without saying that you don’t expect it will feature their best work ever.
So, even though “Now What?!” does not offer anything new and fresh to the history of music and the history of Deep Purple, it’s a record that you can listen to anytime of the day and not get bored of it.
The title of the first track, “A Simple Song”, in my opinion is representative of Deep Purple’s intentions for this album. “Now What?!” is “a simple album” with no surprises, no aces up its sleeve and deprived of any pretentious pompousness whatsoever. OK, there might be a bit of pompousness in (the almost Emerson, Lake & Palmer sounding) “Uncommon Man”, but it’s not pretentious, it’s the good kind, the Deep Purple kind.
The good thing with bands like that is the fact that they couldn’t care less if their record features a radio friendly hit or not. The same thing is obvious in the case of “13”, the new Black Sabbath album. After all those years and hits they are have earned the right to be free to just compose the kind of music they feel like playing. “Now What?!” is definitely an easy-going record rooted deeply in 70’s era hard and blues rock, but with a few interesting surprises here and there.
I mean on the one hand, you have your clean cut old school hard rock songs like: “Weirdistan”, “Body Line” and “Hell to Pay”, as well as your soft and melancholy rock ballads such as: “Blood from a Stone” and “All the Time in the World” but on the other hand, you also get some really interesting elaborate dark virtuoso tunes like: “Out of Hand”, “Uncommon Man”, “Apres Vous” and “Vincent Price” in which you just hear a bunch of old dogs ready to experiment and prove that they know exactly what they’re doing without ever showing off once again.
The truth is that you don’t judge an album by Deep Purple the same way you judge any other. I mean, no one expects a band which was formed way back in 1968 to start trying out new kinds of music. Even if the organ sounding keyboards may be a bit outdated and, at times, plainly funny to someone born within the last 15 years, how weird, not to mention pointless, would it be if Deep Purple decided to give post-grunge a go? When you play a Deep Purple record you expect to hear the kind of music that Deep Purple are known for. But, since this Deep Purple record came out 45 years after their formation, it almost goes without saying that you don’t expect it will feature their best work ever.
So, even though “Now What?!” does not offer anything new and fresh to the history of music and the history of Deep Purple, it’s a record that you can listen to anytime of the day and not get bored of it.