By Monk
When the remaining members of this veteran “supergroup” embarked on their ‘BIG Finish’ farewell tour, fans obviously hoped and prayed that, despite one not being announced, their signing off would be accompanied by one last album. Then, out of the blue, a new single – the band’s first new music in seven years – appeared, defying us to have #GoodLuckTrying to ignore their departure from the rock ‘n’ roll arena, which will see them bid hywl to the Über Kingdom atop the Steelhouse mountain at the end of this month…
Written and recorded on the road, with vocals laid down in hotel rooms and riffs spliced together over the rumble of tour bus wheels, the story of ‘Ten’ may give the impression of being thrown together as a “hey, we better do this” afterthought but the final product is one which exemplifies the polished professionalism one would expect of artistes of this pedigree, with the result being possibly their rawest, most consistent, most honest and therefore hard-hitting, but in the same breath considered album, of their career.
Often it is hard, if not impossible, no matter how we try, for music critics to ignore the chatter around an album. And a lot of the internet commentary around this “farewell” album has been about how, despite the band’s assertions that it is nothing like they have done before, it reminds of their earliest output, before Mr Sheen sprayed his polish all over their sound, exorcising the initial commitment and passion in favour of placating record company executives to faithfully reproduce what had gone before but without the aforesaid ingredients of commitment and passion – a sin which all successful artists are guilty of committing at some stage in their career. Whether or not they regret doing so is a different discussion…
Anyway, to get back to the point in hand, I have to say I agree with much of that chatter, and then some, as ‘Ten’ possesses the sort of vibrancy one would expect from a band at the beginning of their career rather than at its terminus, with the main difference being that the novice excitement has been replaced with a more mature, reflective sense of same, with the musicians concerned having the confidence of their self-belief to produce a body of work which captures and exemplifies both of those individual and collective qualities of belief and confidence.
They say you should always go out on a high. If this is the last recorded material we hear from Mr Big (apart from the imminent live album, of course), then they certainly have done that…
- ‘Ten‘ is released today (Friday 12 July).
- Mr Big kick off the last European leg of their #BigFinish tour tomorrow (Saturday 13 July), hitting Ireland and the ÜK next week:
- All content © Über Rock. Not to be reproduced in part or in whole without the express written permission of Über Rock.