Commencing with singer Akira Fuse's goggle-eyed one-day-old-baby innocence, Love Live Life + 1's album opener 'The Question Mark' escorts us through an eighteen-minute free-rock R&B adventure like nothing before or since. Clanking harsher than even the title track of Funkadelic's Free Your Mind & Your Ass Will Follow, and twice as long; cosmic as the Cosmic Joker's Galactic Supermarket, and gnarly as John McLaughlin's out-there-a-minute axe excursions on Miles's 'Right Off'' or his own Devotion solo LP, do these guys fight for their right to party!
The mellower second side includes the insanely brilliant eight-minute epic 'Shadows Of My Mind,' in which Akira Fuse sings like some drunken Italian baritone, while atonal swooping strings and crazy brass support/undermine him; then it's off into a juggernaut bass-heavy clatterthon with duel-axe outrage of the highest level. And how about that title track whose catchy bastard licks unashamedly rip Sly's 'I Want To Take You Higher,' but still have you singing along with Fuse? The record closes brilliantly with the demented 'Facts About It All,' which opens like Fuse laying a grunting 6/8 James Brown/Eric Burdon ballad on us. But no, this miniature R&B opera says in 2 minutes and 56 seconds what prog bands took a whole side to say.
- Text taken from Julian Cope's Japrocksampler.
Took the 6th spot in Julian Cope's Japrocksampler Top 50.
Love Live Life + 1 - Love Will Make A Better You
- The Question Mark
- Runnin Free
- Love Will Make A Better You
- Shadows of the Mind
- Facts About it All
- Love Will Make A Better You (Live)
BUY: CDJapan
