Both fans and critics (and just to be clear, I\u2019m both) have puzzled over the years at Mott The Hoople\u2019s failure to make it big.\u00a0 A group with this much passion and power and attitude — not to mention a pair of excellent songwriters in lead vocalist Ian Hunter and guitarist Mick Ralphs — coulda shoulda woulda been as big as Led Zeppelin.<\/p>\n
The thing is, there was never anything particularly groundbreaking about the group\u2019s sound; for the most part it was amped-up blues-rock with a heavy Dylan-Stones influence.\u00a0 And they were certainly never — other than for a brief moment at their Bowie-influenced glammiest — the least bit trendy. \u00a0\u00a0Mott were all about a defiant attitude and a total sweaty commitment to live performance; their ten-years-after musical descendants were The Clash, not Blondie.<\/p>\n
But the other factor in their failure to catch fire must also be acknowledged — they were just so damned unpredictable.\u00a0 Chaos might be entertaining onstage, but not so much in the record bins where buying decisions were made back in the day.<\/p>\n
All of which is to say, albums like Mad Shadows<\/i> help to explain why Mott was destined to self-destruct.\u00a0 Keep in mind, all you raving fans of MS<\/i> \u2013 and there are those, make no mistake \u2013 that I\u2019m not saying it\u2019s a bad album.\u00a0 It\u2019s just not very consistent either internally or with the expectations a listener would have had after catching the group\u2019s incendiary self-titled debut.<\/p>\n
Mott The Hoople<\/i>, despite its moments of musical anarchy, felt like a guided missile aimed at the listener\u2019s solar plexus.\u00a0 \u00a0By contrast, Mad Shadows<\/i> careens all over the road like a drunken lunatic, from virtual heavy metal (the Black Sabbath-meets-Bad-Company opener \u201cThunderbuck Ram\u201d) to ringing piano ballads (\u201cNo Wheels To Ride\u201d) to Stonesy jams (album highlight \u201cWalkin\u2019 With A Mountain\u201d even dips into \u201cJumpin\u2019 Jack Flash\u201d in the late going) to plodding blues (the painfully overlong \u201cI Can Feel\u201d).<\/p>\n
With the exception of the relatively concise \u201cYou Are One Of Us\u201d and \u201cWalkin\u2019 With A Mountain,\u201d there isn\u2019t a song here under 4:50 in length, and while Mott were a dynamite musical ensemble, most of these songs would fare better in the final evaluation if the band had reined in their tendency to want to jam to the close of every single tune.\u00a0 It\u2019s exhilarating once and energizing twice.\u00a0 By the fourth or fifth time you start to ask yourself when they\u2019re going to get on with it — nowhere moreso than toward the end of \u201cThread Of Iron,\u201d whose extended closing jam rides the song right off the rails into utter chaos.\u00a0 This might have been exciting to watch on stage, but on a studio album it simply makes them sound careless and sloppy.<\/p>\n
Probably the most notable thing about this album in the end is Ian Hunter\u2019s emergence as a songwriter.\u00a0 After penning just one and a half songs on the group\u2019s debut, he writes four of the seven tunes on this disc, including his first real triumph in the powerhouse \u201cWalkin\u2019 With A Mountain.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mad Shadows<\/i> is a ramshackle charmer of an album that tries to get by on a sloppy grin and pure will, but doesn\u2019t ultimately achieve any sort of musical focus.\u00a0 If your thing is musical anarchy, early \u201970s style, this might be more up your alley than mine.\u00a0 If so, though, you were in the minority in 1970.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":29823,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[8377],"rating":[5614],"class_list":["post-41438","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-mott-the-hoople","rating-rating-c-plus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/41438","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41438"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/41438\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29823"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41438"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=41438"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=41438"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}