The Harvey Steel Show
Full Double Rainbow!
No label / distributed by Diger Distro, tigernet.no

Harvey Steel and his merry Show with creatures from Jupiter are back with a longplayer, available on vinyl with a CD inserted, cassette and stream- or downloadable. They seem to have learned more about earthly music since last we heard from them, the EP We're Living On Borrowed Cheeze that arrived just in time for Christmas last year. Full Double Rainbow! contains quite a bit of American music genres like rock and/or roll, blues and jazz, even blues-gospel and something close to mariachi-music from south of the US border for a little while, but with hilarious ideas from outer or inner space now and again. It starts very neat with "More Or Less", a tight and almost streamlined little bluesy rocker that works very well to jump up and to, until a jazzy trumpet comes along. The trumpet seems to be a trademark of the album, more so than on the EP, and gives it a distinct feature, though sometimes sounding straight, sometimes multi-layered or jazzy. Once or twice it can turn a bit too merry for its own good, but I guess that's purely intentional.

The extra-terrestrial tendencies are particularly audible in the instrumental parts of "More Acid (Less Kool-Aid)", "Yes We Can", "Lucifer" and the all instrumental title track. Here they enters more jazzy and free-form terrain and push borders both south- and northwards to some extent; the favourite parts of the album to these ears. A lot going on with guitar and trumpet in particular. On "Lucifer" they enters something close to space rock, most appropriate for a band originating from Jupiter. Otherwise they seem a bit marked by earthly conventions. The album as a whole seems more inspired by blues and blues-rock than anything else, with quite rough guitars, especially "Speed Of Life", other parts of "Lucifer" and "God's The Elevator (I'm The Revelator)". The latter sounds suspiciously similar to " God's The Elevator/I'm The Revelator " from the EP but leans towards big band blues due to the jazz-blues brass. The neat "Yes We Can" with tendencies towards funk suggests the Show has picked up something from Obama's campaign for presidency in the first place. And the lyrics of song firmly confirms what we might've suspected: sure, they can!

Copyright © 2015 JP