I jumped on the Deep Purple bandwagon fairly early, and so some time in 1971, I must have visited one of my local record stores and purchased Fireball.
But 1971 was a long time ago, and I find that I have not played this album very often over the ensuing years. I tend instead to gravitate toward In Rock, Who Do You Think We Are, and Machine Head. I always say that the albums you actually listen to define what you consider excellent and not so good. Returning to this to album, I feel that it is not a bad album by any stretch of the imagination but rather, that it just gets lost in the vast Deep Purple catalogue.
I find Fireball to be a bit more experimental than I want from Deep Purple – worse, though, I find it repetitive in places. Jon Lord and Ritchie Blackmore just don’t mesh as well as they do on other releases. Lord seems to want to move Deep Purple in a different musical direction, while Blackmore wants to continue the guitar-based sound of In Rock.
The better songs contained on this disc are “Strange Kind Of Woman,” featuring a nice double guitar solo by Blackmore, “The Mule,” which returns the group to its frenetic-paced rock & roll best, and “Anyone’s Daughter” which is unique (for Deep Purple) — an acoustic story-song with some nice piano lines in support.
The title song showcases some typical Blackmore-Lord dueling on guitar and keyboards, but it is not up to the quality of its live performances. This song has remained a part of the Deep Purple concert act for decades and is much stronger in that context.
The three longest songs here are also the weakest: “No No No” contains an excellent Ian Gillian vocal, but it cannot overcome the aforementioned repetitiveness of Ritchie Blackmore’s guitar runs; “Fools” clocks in at over eight minutes, but Blackmore would have been better served to have cut out about three of those; “No One Came” is an average song at best with the group seemingly just going through the motions.
Fireball remains an average Deep Purple release; instead, I recommend downloading the three standout tracks individually rather than slogging through the whole release.
