The Classic Album series brings back must-have albums from the '60s and '70s that are still as relevant today as they were when originally released
Marco Rossi, Record Collector JUNE 27, 2009
Wide Open
There’s never a lost Antipodean prog masterpiece when you want one, then several come along all at once. Like buses. Buses full of koalas. Koalas wearing capes.
Like the Madder Lake album reviewed elsewhere in this isuse, Wide Open eschews “artsy” and comes down heavily on the side of “fartsy”, aiming its kicks directly at the gonads. Merely referring to it as psych-tinged blues-rock is, however, reductive and insulting, because Kahvas Jute really put their backs into those arrangements.
The melodic, sinuous twin guitar parts, courtesy of Tim Gaze and Dennis Wilson, would have been assured and inventive enough to have given Wishbone Ash some serious cause for concern at the time, had fate been kinder to Kahvas Jute.
Better still, the level of imagination on display here when the guitars cut loose – on Free, Steps Of Time or nine-minute album highlight Parade Of Fools, say – owes more to the exploratory mindset of San Franciscan acid-rock than the lazily pentatonic scalar runs which were the era’s default setting.
Factor in some ballsy and dextrous Jack Bruce-style bass playing by Bob Daisley, and the bustling, beardy drumming of Dannie Davidson, and you have hog heaven.
Wide Open is available on vinyl in the Store