American Woman <\/i>is both the Guess Who\u2019s finest album statement and the original group\u2019s swan song, and it\u2019s a fine way for Randy Bachman to exit. <\/p>\n
Yes, the band continued to have success for several years, but after the tour for this one Bachman left to form Bachman-Turner Overdrive, and the Guess Who quickly went through a downward slide, from \u201cBus Rider\u201d to \u201cSour Suite\u201d to the awful \u201cClap For The Wolfman.\u201d With Bachman on board, they were a pretty good band for a few years there, and it culminated in this album.<\/p>\n
Up to this point, most of the music had been pretty low-key (\u201cLaughing,\u201d \u201cThese Eyes,\u201d the superb \u201cUndun\u201d), but the guitar crunch was turned up for this album, and it paid off on the hit \u201cNo Time.\u201d The tune was a re-recording of the one from Canned Wheat<\/i>; where that sounded more like a garage band jam, this is a polished, melodic, fuzz-heavy guitar piece with the band firing on all cylinders and it’s a keeper.<\/p>\n
Smarmy lyrics mar \u201cAmerican Woman,\u201d but you can\u2019t beat the transition from the acoustic opener (sometimes dropped when played nowadays on the radio) to the classic riff and the guitar solos throughout. The dual song approach also comes up in \u201cNo Sugar Tonight\/New Mother Nature,\u201d with the first song playing, then the second, then both merging together at the end. The piece works well as a whole, although \u201cNew Mother Nature\u201d is catchier, and Jocko says yes, and I believe him.<\/p>\n
A bag of goodies and bottle of wine surely were factors in the art-rock acoustics of \u201cTalisman,\u201d the band\u2019s only trip down this road (\u201cArtificial flowers cannot die for life within them is illusion \/ Talisman, grace my hand”, and so on, for five minutes). Right. Skip it and try the groove of \u201cProper Stranger\u201d or the boogie rock of \u201c8:15.\u201d Another re-recorded song is offered with \u201cWhen Friends Fall Out,\u201d which starts off decent with a fuzzy guitar tone and good vocal harmonies but falls apart in the psychedelic bridge. <\/p>\n
The pretty good instrumental \u201c909\u201d is worth a spin or two, but the bonus CD track \u201cGot To Find A Way\u201d is pretty slow and yields no reward. The closing \u201cHumpty\u2019s Blues\/American Woman (Epilogue)\u201d tries to bring it full circle, but the blues half of the song is grating after a while; it\u2019s nowhere near as organic as the jam that bore the first part of the title track to start the album.<\/p>\n
With a better hits to filler ratio than other Guess Who albums and with three of the band\u2019s best hits present, this turns out to be a pretty good album. It\u2019s not great, but it\u2019s worth seeking out for fans who will appreciate what the band was trying to do here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":31144,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[6674],"rating":[5612],"class_list":["post-42832","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-the-guess-who","rating-rating-b-minus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/42832","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\/45"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42832"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/42832\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31144"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42832"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=42832"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=42832"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}