Blues Creation - Live! (1971 japanese, astonishing heavy-psychedelic-blues/rock - 02 bonus tracks) Flac

Japan's Blues Creation started off as standard late '60s traditional blues-rock band but quickly got all heavy and freaky and proto-metallic and sort of became their country's riffy acid-blues answer to Black Sabbath (well, along with a few others like Flied Egg and of course AQ faves the Flower Travellin' Band, who covered Sabbath on their first album).

A great heavy band who started out with the LP ‘Blues Creation’ [Polydor, 1969], containing hard blues rock with a garage band hangover. It was a good album but didn’t really stand out from the crowd, lacking originality. 

These guys really shone, however, on their 2nd album ‘Demon & Eleven Children’ [Denon, 1971], by which time they had become considerably hairier than 2 years previous [both in sound and appearance!]. It’s a wild ride of early heavy progressive rock, in a raw and bluesy early Black Sabbath-influenced mode – and, by extension, comparable to other similar heavies of the era such as Incredible Hog. 

Their next album saw them hook up with the already well-known [in Japan] vocalist Carmen Maki - ‘Carmen Maki & Blues Creation’ [Denon, 1972]. For fans of the previous album, this is often a bit of a disappointment, as there are only a few tunes that are heavy or rock much at all, the remainder being fairly generic slow blues and ballads to make room for Maki’s Joplin-wannabe wailings. 

Well, maybe that’s unfair – Maki does have more restraint and a purer tone of voice than Joplin, and isn’t really a copyist. The heavier tracks are uniformly great, a tighter and more confident [but more compact] evolution from the previous album’s style.

01. Rolling Stone 
02. Nightmare 
03. Drinkin Blues 
04. Demon And Eleven Children 
05. Understand (Feat Carmen Maki) 
06. Tobacco Road

Bonus

07.Baby Please Don't Go

08. Empty Heart