Artist: Deep Purple
Album: Machine Head {2010 Audio Fidelity 24 KT + Gold, AFZ 065}
Release Date: March, 2010
Release Date of Original: March, 1972
Label: Audio Fidelity
Label of Original: Warner Bros. Records
Info:
Many the consider Deep Purple's 1972 album Machine Head (their sixth studio album) to be their greatest effort. It was certainly their most successful recording, topping the charts worldwide.
The classic line up includes Ritchie Blackmore's shredding and slinging riffs, Jon Lord's haunting keyboards and Ian Gillan's threatening rock and blues vocals blending with the no-nonsense style of Roger Glover's bass and the energy of Ian Paice on drums.
The band defined themselves with hard-knocking metal classics including "Smoke on the Water," featuring one of the most memorable guitar solos in the history of Rock &Roll and "Highway Star," the ultimate speed metal song.
Deep Purple proved with this album that they know how to play their metal music loud, impressive and hard-rocking and Machine Head is not only often cited as being very influential in the development of heavy metal music, but it's widely recognized as "the original heavy metal album" essential to any rock library.
It was recorded at the Grand Hotel Montreux, Switzerland in December 1971 with the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio.
Machine Head is one of three in the Holy British Trinity of Metal - a landmark achievement for classic metal. (The other two are Led Zeppelin IV and Black Sabbath's Paranoid.)
In 2001, Q magazine named it as one of the 50 Heaviest Albums of All Time.
Features:
• 24 KT Gold CD
• Numbered, Limited Edition
• HDCD
• From original master tapes
Audio Fidelity's 24 KT + Gold series brings you classic music in deluxe packaging with see through slip cases (ala DCC), using original graphics, all beautifully reproduced. Audio Fidelity only uses the original two track master tape which is played back on a specifically constructed vintage tube playback deck. Here's where the plus (+) comes in: The analog masters are put through AF's new proprietary A/D converter which adds true "breath of life" to the music, making the new 24 KT + Gold CD series the best sounding music you can buy, period!
Credits:
Deep Purple:
Ritchie Blackmore: Guitar
Ian Gillan: Vocals
Roger Glover: Bass
Jon Lord: Keyboards
Ian Paice: Drums
Technical & Production Credits:
Engineer: Martin Birch
Assistant: Jeremy (Bear) Gee
Technician: Nick
Rolling Stones Mobile Unit
Recorded in Montreux, Switzerland
Equipment: Ian Hansford, Rob Cooksey, Colin Hart
Album devised and produced by Deep Purple
Produced by Deep Purple for Edwards Coletta Productions
Each track is a group composition published by HEC music.
Photography: Shepard Sherbell
Cover Design: R. Glover, J. Coletta
Mastered for this CD by Steve Hoffman
Graphics for this CD by Bob Wynne Graphics
Production Coordination for this CD: Ernie Campagna
Manufactured by Rhino Entertainment Company, a Warner Music Group Company
HDCD Encoded
All songs written by Blackmore, Gillan, Glover, Lord and Paice.
Tracklist:
01. Highway Star 6:07
02. Maybe I'm A Leo 4:51
03. Pictures Of Home 5:06
04. Never Before 4:03
05. Smoke On The Water 5:43
06. Lazy 7:23
07. Space Truckin' 4:34
Reviews:
The Deep Purple classic rock-metal album Machine Head (1972) is another one of those “must have” titles regardless of how many copies or versions you have now (I have the re-mastered 2CD anniversary edition from Rhino). If you do not have this recording in your collection, you have no right to call yourself a rocker. Why do I say that? Well if you listen to it and look back on what a landmark release this was, all seven vital tracks, it does not take long to realize that albums like this come along rarely and this one happens to be a template for blues influenced (listen to “Lazy”) rock and metal.
The classic lineup that included Ritchie Blackmore (guitar), Jon Lord (keyboards), Ian Gillan (vocals), Roger Glover (bass) and Ian Paice (drums) are at their very best here and don’t forget the rock staple that came out of this session--“Smoke On The Water”. Those who enjoy rock music know that song and it does not matter what age you are.
Deep Purple is one of my favorite bands of all time and Audio Fidelity seems to like them as well, thank god. This 24-karat gold version is not only an excellent representation of one of the heaviest albums in the history of recorded music, the label’s special processing brings out the very best and the pure raw energy of the Deep Purple sound just as if the band stepped out of the studio yesterday. A good example of that perfected re-mastering sound is on “Space Truckin’”, about three quarters of the way through where Ritchie Blackmore and Ian Paice take center stage; it sounded like they were standing right behind me wailing away - amazing. There are many moments like that on the album that I never noticed so distinctly before.
Think back to another time when people went down the street to pick up their favorite singles or vinyl LPs at a favorite record store then multiply that time period sound and clarity by 10 and that is what you will hear on this astounding version of Machine Head. There is no over re-mastering here to water down the sound; it comes directly from the source tapes of the original album with all the artwork and the classic Audio Fidelity windowpane slipcover.
This one is a no-brainer--you just gotta have it!
Key Tracks: Highway Star, Space Truckin’, Smoke On The Water
5/5 Stars
~ Keith Hannaleck, Musik Reviews and a Featured Contributor to Associated Content
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Reviews of Original:
Led Zeppelin's fourth album, Black Sabbath's Paranoid, and Deep Purple's Machine Head have stood the test of time as the Holy Trinity of English hard rock and heavy metal, serving as the fundamental blueprints followed by virtually every heavy rock & roll band since the early '70s. And, though it is probably the least celebrated of the three, Machine Head contains the "mother of all guitar riffs" — and one of the first learned by every beginning guitarist — in "Smoke on the Water." Inspired by real-life events in Montreux, Switzerland, where Deep Purple were recording the album when the Grand Hotel was burned to the ground during a Frank Zappa concert, neither the song, nor its timeless riff, should need any further description. However, Machine Head was anything but a one-trick pony, introducing the bona fide classic opener "Highway Star," which epitomized all of Deep Purple's intensity and versatility while featuring perhaps the greatest soloing duel ever between guitarist Ritchie Blackmore and organist Jon Lord. Also in top form was singer Ian Gillan, who crooned and exploded with amazing power and range throughout to establish himself once and for all as one of the finest voices of his generation, bar none. Yes, the plodding shuffle of "Maybe I'm a Leo" shows some signs of age, but punchy singles "Pictures of Home" and "Never Before" remain as vital as ever, displaying Purple at their melodic best. And finally, the spectacular "Space Truckin'" drove Machine Head home with yet another tremendous Blackmore riff, providing a fitting conclusion to one of the essential hard rock albums of all time.
~ Eduardo Rivadavia, All Music Guide
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Original Rolling Stone Magazine Review
(May 25, 1972)
I just don't understand, as Ann-Margret once sang, why an exciting band like Deep Purple, who consistently hit the top of the charts in Merrie Olde and have taken Europe by storm, remain a comparatively unknown quantity to American audiences. Especially when said audiences have wholeheartedly embraced bands with similar musical aims and not one more ampere of excitement.
It's a shame, but Deep Purple themselves are at least partially to blame. Their first two American albums on Tetragrammaton were mostly uninspired, despite some good cover versions of songs like "I'm So Glad" and "Hush." The basic problem seemed to be that the group hadn't really learned to write yet, so the covers were the best way to grow without losing the audience. Except that no self-respecting late-Sixties rock band wants to put out an album with nothing but covers on it, so we were left with a bunch of boring originals, half of them instrumental. When, that is, they weren't indulging in long "improvisational" forays such as their first album's bolero rendition of "Hey Joe." Jon Lord was the main culprit here, having a background of extensive formal keyboard training which tended to make his solos at least a bit Emersonic and at most positively pompous. The pretentious side of Deep Purple found its fullest expression in their first album for Warner's, Concerto For Group and Orchestra, written by Lord and performed with the aid of Malcolm Arnold and the "Royal Philharmonic Orchestra."
It was an atrocity. A "movement" would begin with a few minutes of "symphonic" mush, then abruptly the orchestra would stop and the band would start to play, build until you thought they were just about to really start cooking, and then–whoosh–drowned in string sections again. A recent Lord-Arnold collaboration on Capitol called Gemini Suite was just more of the same miscegenation.
Fortunately, the band has seemingly realized that that sort of thing can get out of hand, because their last three albums have finally found a comfortably furious groove for them to work in, making them prime contenders among the most searingly loud and heavy bands on both sides of the Atlantic. Deep Purple in Rock was a dynamic, frenzied piece of work sounding not a little like the MC5 (anybody who thinks that all heavy bands put out thudding slabs of "downer" music just hasn't gotten into Deep Purple). Fireball was more of the same, if not quite as frantically effective. Machine Head bears strong similarities to both its immediate predecessors, lying qualitatively somewhere in between the two.
And like both of them, though it delivers the Sound, the rushing, grating crunch of the hard attack, it has its ups and downs compositionally. "Highway Star" is a great opening track, quite similar both structurally and thematically to "Speed King" and "Fireball," the openers of the two previous albums. The pace is blistering, almost too fast for comfort, with lyrics that take the primeval cargirl equation and turn it into something as breathtakingly homicidal as Alice Cooper's "Under My Wheels": "Nobody gonna take my car/I'm gonna race it to the ground/Nobody gonna beat my car/It's gonna break the speed of sound/Oooh it's a killing machine/It's got everything ..."
"Space Truckin'" is just as good, a sci-fi boogie that's the perfect answer to all the Kantnerian pomposities and turns out to be the missing link between them and things like Wild Man Fischer's "Rocket Rock" (lyrically) and the Doors' "Hello I Love You" (musically). Once again the lyrics are ace, and never let it be said that Deep Purple don't have a sense of humor: "We had a lot of luck on Venus/We always have a ball on Mars/Meeting all the groovy people ... We'd move to the Canaveral moonstop/And everyone would dance and sway/We got music in our solar system/We're space truckin' round the stars."
In between those two Deep Purple classics lies nothing but good, hard, socking music, although some of the lyrics may leave a bit to be desired. It says on the liner that "This album was written and recorded in Montreux, Switzerland, between 6th and 21st December, 1971," and much of it sounds like it was conceived on the fly, what with deathless lines like "You're lazy you just stay in bed/You don't want no money/You don't want no bread." There's even trials getting Machine Head recorded: it seemed that some local arsonist burned down the best recording studio in town but luckily the Rolling Stones' mobile unit was on hand to get the new D. Purple out on schedule.
Frankly, I am not offended at all by the offhand nature of those songs. Rather than either condemn or apologize for their triteness, I will merely refer you to the current issue of Who Put the Bomp magazine, where Mark Shipper makes note of the fact that Sky Saxon wrote "Pushin' Too Hard" for the Seeds in ten minutes while waiting for his girl to get out of a supermarket–and comments that he'd rather not publish a review of any album that contains a song that took longer than ten minutes to write.
Now, I can't be that much of a purist, because I'm sure that "Highway Star" and "Space Truckin'" took at least 20 minutes each to compose, but I do know that this very banality is half the fun of rock 'n' roll. And I am confident that I will love the next five Deep Purple albums madly so long as they sound exactly like these last three.
~ Lester Bangs, Rolling Stone Magazine
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