Dear Uwe, I’d gladly accept German Kartoffeln, without sauerkraut or sauces, perhaps with the famous Nuremberg sausages!
That said, Jon’s work with Ride is minimalist as well as curious, I can imagine the tenderness with which Jon lent his service on a retro song that perhaps reminded him a little of his youth, and where Ride also didn’t make full use of the Maestro’s hands!
It must be said that Ride’s compositional style, Shoegaze, was not born to show off, but rather to create atmospheres with tons of reverb and effects and obsessive riffs.
This British-psychedelic-stoner musical genre has never made me say Wow, maybe it’s because it’s related to alternative and Brit pop which I historically respect but which leave me indifferent.
I prefer to go for things where the technique and taste of the musicians is more noticeable, like The Gathering for psychedelia, or Monster Magnet for stoner for example.
The surprising thing about Ride was that their first album Nowhere came out in 1990 as S&M and if I compare the two albums in terms of sound they are opposites, and it’s surprising how Ride sounded retro and for this reason had appeal to young British people, just as the nascent grunge was becoming popular among young Americans.
Coming back to Jon, his few collaborations with other artists after the MK II bis Réunion are nothing sensational, little accompanying works like the synths in Gilmour’s Until We Sleep (nice sound but too muddy by David’s guitar)
or the piano on Brainwashed by the “next door neighbor” George Harrison (by the way, the riff of this song is practically the same progression as SOTW with a different seasoning, and I don’t think anyone was shocked!)
Like many indicated, all of the Morse era albums are good. Abandon is top to bottom my least favorite Morse era record.
Things I like…
Seventh Heaven is one of my favorite tracks by the band. Fingers to the Bone, Watching the Sky also get a lot of love but I’ve always liked She Was… Paicey really shines on that one.
as other mentioned I love the production on the first two albums. Bananas and ROTD are great records but production was crap (as witnessed by the remastered ROTD.
Things I don’t like
aside from She Was, the second half of the record is completely forgettable. Mid tempo rockers with forgettable riffs. Morse seemed determine to be heavier but a lot of it sounded forced.
Zenos congratulations on the wonderful review, I agree with everything.
The compositional variety of Abandon and the attention to many small details in the arrangement of the songs is unmatched in Purple’s discography with Morse.
probably in its entirety it is technically the most structured and difficult album of the entire Purple discography.
Steve gives a monstrous performance, 10 out of 10 and his solos and rhythms were truly inspired.
Ian Paice inhuman, an extraterrestrial.
BigIan’s harmonies are varied and very melodic
Roger has a good sound and is even the main lead on 2-3 songs.
I had already talked about Jon above.
Abandon is a choral album where all 5 fit together perfectly.
No, I didn’t, for one. The news that Jon has submitted his resignation after that Hammersmith gig took me by surprise. I mean, it was in the air that Jon is not completely happy, but there was no timeline.
Also, little birdie told me that for the Russian tour that followed the UK, Bruce had requested visas for both Jon and Don. Just to be prepared for any eventualities.
I have to be honest, Abandon is probably my least favourite Deep Purple album of all time.
I think I have listened to the whole thing once in nearly 30 years, and I never had the slightest desire to put it on again. I honestly can’t remember one song where I thought: “Yes, I really need to hear that again.”
It is certainly heavy. Very heavy in places. But to my ears it is heavy without really being exciting. A lot of the riffs sound forced and strangely uninspired, almost as if they were trying very hard to make a dark, aggressive hard rock record, but without the natural musical ingredients to make that sort of thing work.
And this is where my Blackmore bias probably comes in. With Ritchie, even the simplest riff usually had some identity to it. There was tension, space, melody, a bit of danger and usually something slightly unexpected. He didn’t just make things heavy by playing a heavy riff. There was always some musical character behind it.
With Abandon, Steve Morse is obviously a fantastic guitarist, but this particular kind of heavy, brooding riff-based Purple never sounded completely natural to him in my opinion. It sometimes feels like he is being asked to speak a musical language that isn’t really his own.
Gillan is another problem for me on this album. This was around the time when that half-sung, half-spoken, barking style really started becoming much more noticeable. I know some people like it, but I don’t. On Abandon I found his vocals quite hard to listen to even back then.
And Jon Lord is strangely anonymous on much of the record for me. That is probably one of the biggest problems. When you think about classic Purple, the whole point was never just guitar riffs. It was the guitar and Hammond constantly pushing against each other. On Abandon I rarely get that feeling. Whether Jon was already mentally moving towards other musical things by then, I don’t know, but his creative personality doesn’t seem nearly as important to the record as it should be.
That is maybe what I miss most as an old Blackmore-era fan: not necessarily Ritchie himself, but that feeling that every member was pulling the music in a slightly different direction and somehow it created tension. Abandon sounds to me much more one-dimensional.
Heavy riff. Heavy riff. Gillan growls something. Another heavy riff.
And after a while I just want to abandon Abandon.
I know there are some Morse-era fans who really like this album, so I am genuinely interested in what they hear in it that I don’t. But for me personally, this is right down at the bottom of the Purple catalogue, together with Come Taste the Band.
I wouldn’t be surprised if, in another 20 or 30 years, Abandon is one of those Purple albums hardly anybody talks about apart from a small group of dedicated Morse-era fans.
Maybe I’m being too harsh, but after nearly three decades I still haven’t felt any urge to give it that second listen.
Steve Morse is not a natural heavy riffing guitarist, simple really. Listen to his music from before Deep Purple, where are those ‘heavy’ riffing riffs? One of the little query’s in certain peoples minds when we heard that he had joined DP. Ted the Mechanic is about it really and that has a similarity to On The Pipe from The Introduction album. I also agree with TheBlackboots in regard to Ian Gillan’s ‘barking’ vocal, he started losing his natural take on things at this time, Bananas is worse for that on most songs. We all hear things differently, horses for courses. The vocal affects the quality of the song, this is where I drifted away from DP until Now What. Infinite is lost on me too, Whoosh had some good songs on it. The latest two probably suit Gillan much more don’t we think. This is not a slant on Steve Morse at all. Some people are more suited to each other than others within musical collaborations. it happens. Steve was more suited to Kansas when we really get down to it. From the same neck of the woods etc. All good for him though to join an existing known band and to try a few things out, why not? Did it go on too long, most probably. Hindsight again eh? Cheers.
Hmm… Jon was pretty clear with me after Grimsby, so I presumd he’d been telling plenty of others. I think the set was even largely chosen by him.
I hadn’t heard the visa bit though I can believe it. They had already persuaded him to stay on after Concerto 2000, so maybe they thought they could again. But he was just fed up with all the travelling.
I‘ve never perceived Abandon as a weak album, rather it is a strange one, a curator’s egg in the Purple canon. That is not a crime to me, I often like strange albums and prefer them to “more of the same“-ones. It is dense, it is brooding and somber, it’s not especially lively, more determined, there is a lot of Steve Morse on it (perhaps because Jon was already retreating), all that is true, but is it a bad album because of that? I don’t think so. Maybe not a light listen, you have to be in the mood for it.
I think a main difference between Ritchie and Steve as riffmeisters is that to Ritchie the riff was the core idea of a song and everything else arranged around it, while Steve would actually write riffs to fit into the arrangement of pre-existing music (something Ritchie never did). Ritchie was an original, but not all that flexible. Steve was endlessly flexible, but also more technical, less immediate.
Ritchie’s riffing - all that trademark stuff he would play on his D and G string in fourths like SOTW, Painted Horse, Burn, MOTSM, Kill the King, LLRnR, All Night Long, Spotlight Kid and KAYBD to name not nearly all of them - is very, very much from one cookbook. We as Purple and Rainbow fans adore it (I don’t count myself out and when I first started writing music, all my riffs would be played in fourths on the D and G string too, I thought it was a law onto itself and the only way to properly write a riff ), but I remember a lot of people, guitarists among them, who even in the 70s said: The guy is a one-trick-pony, how many more times is he gonna do this? There is a fine line between style and limitation.
Steve draws from a much larger pool of influences (and he‘s for one thing not as enslaved by minorish scales as Ritchie, which is why Steve often sounds Southern Rock‘ish), his riffs are often also a lot more sophisticated than Ritchie‘s whose undeniable accessibility and immediacy is to a very large degree down to the fact that they are not that difficult to play (not a slight, Ritchie likes a certain simplicity and consistency in his music and he was good at coming up with it). I remember so many rehearsal room scenes back in the day where I would propose a riff and someone would quip: Ugh, Uwe, mind coming up with something that sounds a little less Deep Purple/Ritchie Blackmore?!
same-y tunes talking about the melodies of Abandon I find it very curious, considering the increasingly frequent recycling of melodies from post-bananas albums.
for me melodically Abandon is exactly the most varied album with the most successful bridges and choruses,
but everyone has their own point of view, and Abandon still proves to be the most divisive album in the (recent?) history of DP
As I am very fond of the album, I don’t know if I disagree much with your notions, but how I interpret them.
First and foremost, because when I first heard it, I had not heard anything from Purpendicular (and nothing else of course existed yet), the soundscapes and compositions and everything on Abandon, to me, is the way new Deep Purple music is “supposed” to sound. (Think something like this: you heard Stormbringer a zillion times before hearing a note off Burn. There’s little contest on which album is more universally acclaimed, but how Mark III sounds, to you, is the music on Stormbringer.)
With this in mind, I have never really thought before about Jon’s role on the record, but now that people have pointed it out, aside the prominent piano on Fingers To The Bone, he is not behind the most memorable moments. Also, Abandon is abrasive and heavy-handed. But so was everything else in the late 90’s, that’s how rock music was put together then.
Most divisive? I can think of quite a few more: Fireball, WDWTWA, Stormbringer, CTTB, THOBL, S&M, TBRO, Bananas and ROTD, to some people all of the Ezrin era is divisive, to others anything with Simon. At the end of the day about half of Purple’s oeuvre is regarded divisive by a not negligible amount of people who take an interest in the band.
And yet … some of those “divisive” candidates are real gems to me. And I wouldn’t even call Abandon especially divisive, “unjustly forgotten/slipped thru all cracks” more like. It’s not my favorite Morse Era album, but I hold no ill will against it. And since a posting by Uwe cannot go by without him saying something incendiary: I think Abandon would have turned out even better had the keyboarder’s name been Don and not Jon. The music on that album would have been right up Don’s alley. Sharpen your knives!
But in the end I’m gracious with all DP albums and happy they all exist with the exception of one - roll -, yup, you guessed it, TBRO would have for my purposes been sufficient as a limited edition EP consisting of Anya, TBRO (the song) and Solitaire! As a parting gift to Ritchie for whom it was high time to go.
But in the end I’m gracious with all DP albums and happy they all exist with the exception of one - roll -, yup, you guessed it, TBRO would have for my purposes been sufficient as a limited edition EP consisting of Anya, TBRO (the song) and Solitaire! As a parting gift to Ritchie for whom it was high time to go.
This otherwise interesting setup would have deprived us of “Lord, I need some time, I need, I need some time, some time, some time, some time to kill” before Jon delivers his organ solo.
An AbanDon album is quite hard to imagine, especially with his latter-day fondness of analogue synthesizer sounds that, if something, would be out of place on practically all of those tracks.
I see what you mean about the difference between Ritchie and Steve as riff writers, and I actually think thats one of the more interesting points here.
Ritchie often started with a riff and then the song was built around it, while Steve seems much more able to fit guitar parts into an already existing arrangement. I think thats probably true.
But I have to disagree pretty strongly with the idea that Ritchie can more or less be reduced to those riffs in fourths on the D and G strings.
Yes of course he used that alot. Smoke, Burn, Kill the King, Man on the Silver Mountain, All Night Long, Spotlight Kid etc. Its obviously part of his musical language.
But thats only one side of him.
What about Gates of Babylon? Wasted Sunsets? Anya? Solitaire? The Battle Rages On? Catch the Rainbow? Rainbow Eyes? Stargazer? Ariel?
Those songs are not just another version of the same Blackmore riff. There is much more going on. Harmony, atmosphere, unusual chord changes, classical stuff, medieval influences, melody, tension.
Gates of Babylon alone makes the “one trick pony” argument difficult for me. Thats a completely different musical world to something like Smoke on the Water.
Wasted Sunsets is another one. There isnt even really a typical Blackmore riff carrying the song. Its the chords, the mood, the space and then what he plays over it. Same with Anya and Solitaire.
And even TBRO, which I know you love dearly , is more than just some simple riff. The oriental feel, the harmony, Jon underneath it and Ritchie building the tension around the whole thing… thats songwriting for me, not just riff writing.
So yes, Ritchie had a cookbook. No doubt.
But there were quite a few chapters in it. Not only the D and G string chapter.
Steve probably has the wider technical vocabulary, I wont argue about that. He can pull things from jazz, fusion, country, Southern Rock, classical music and god knows what else.
But I still think Ritchie was the better songwriter.
He could write something incredibly simple and make it unforgettable, but he could also come up with something atmospheric, strange, almost cinematic sometimes. And most important, it nearly always sounded like HIM.
Thats exactly what I miss on Abandon.
Steve’s riffs may be more sophisticated technically, but alot of them just dont stay with me. I can hear that five very good musicians are working hard, but I dont hear many ideas where I think “I need to hear that again”.
I’d take one simple Blackmore idea with personality over ten clever riffs I have forgotten five minutes later.
Your Don Airey comment is actually interesting though. I can already hear the Jon Lord police outside.
For this particular heavy and dark kind of Purple, Don might really have fitted the album better. Not because he is “better” than Jon, absolutely not, but Jon sounds strangely absent to me on Abandon anyway. Almost like his mind was already somewhere else.
And then TBRO…
Sorry Uwe, now youve gone too far.
I agree its not one of Purple’s greatest albums and yes, there is some filler on it. But Anya, The Battle Rages On, Solitaire and quite a few of Ritchie’s moments on that record still have more tension, personality and atmosphere for me than most of Abandon.
Even when Ritchie was bored, angry or already half way out the door, I still get this feeling that something might happen when he picks up the Strat.
With Abandon I mostly hear five excellent musicians trying very hard.
Maybe thats the main difference for me. Abandon sounds constructed.
The best Blackmore era Purple often sounds like it could fall apart at any second, but somehow it doesnt.
), but I remember a lot of people, guitarists among them, who even in the 70s said: The guy is a one-trick-pony, how many more times is he gonna do this? 
There is a fine line between style and limitation.
roll -, yup, you guessed it, TBRO would have for my purposes been sufficient as a limited edition EP consisting of Anya, TBRO (the song) and Solitaire! As a parting gift to Ritchie for whom it was high time to go.