After their debut black mass and
the more colorfully proggy Shine on
Brightly, Procol Harum once again shifted sails for an album that was both
more stripped down and more elaborately adorned than their first two. With its
simple folk and blues songs and more ambitious orchestral mini-epics, A Salty Dog was Procol operating at
full maturity. The democratization of vocal duties further set it apart from
the two records before it.
Needless to say, Matthew Fisher and Robin Trower couldn’t beat Gary
Brooker’s magnificent voice, but they both add variety to the proceedings
(Fisher’s reedy though earnest voice is particularly pleasing), and Brooker
gets what may be his most stunning vocal spotlights with the title track and
“All This and More”. A Salty Dog is a
masterful album, both Procol’s finest, and as far as I’m concerned, the finest
by any artist in a year that included Led
Zeppelin, Let It Bleed, Abbey Road,
Tommy, and The Band.
Then Fisher departed and the band
changed more significantly than ever. Without Fisher’s signature organ parts,
Trower stepped in to fill the gap, and the band made its most guitar-heavy
record with Home. Keith Reid’s
death-obsessed lyrics are pretty heavy too, often crossing into outright
horror. Brooker didn’t allow the lyrics’ thematic consistency to beat his music
into a sort of Gothic monotony. He danced all over the place with Hammer horror
doom and gloom (“The Dead Man’s Dream”), rollicking pop (making the ridiculously
violent “Still There’ll Be More” all the more ridiculous), folk balladry
(“Nothing That I Didn’t Know”), pub sing-along (“Your Own Choice”), and outright prog (“Whaling Stories”). With
Trower, he co-wrote “Whiskey Train”, the hardest rocking thing in Procol’s valise.
Without Fisher’s voice and organ flourishes to add extra color, or the sweeping
orchestrations of A Salty Dog, Home isn’t as grand as the previous
record, but it is another excellent record and the capper for the band’s most
satisfying period.
Since Esoteric Records has not
announced remasters of Broken Barricades
or Live with the Edmonton Symphony
Orchestra as of this writing, A Salty
Dog and Home may also be the
cappers of the label’s current remaster series. That would be a shame, since all
of these discs re-mastered from the original tapes sound fabulous. As I wrote
in my review of the first two remasters, Salvo was the last label to reissue
Procol’s catalogue, and its versions of the first two albums both contained
tracks running at the wrong speeds. That label’s issues of Salty Dog and Home
suffered no such issues, but Esoteric’s still sound markedly superior to
Salvo’s relatively thin and bright masters. This is never clearer than on
Esoteric’s remaster of A Salty Dog,
which really allows its roomy acoustics and eclectic instrumentation to live
and breathe. The improvement in the resonance and depth of B.J. Wilson’s drums
is striking on both discs.
Once again, I received single-disc
versions of Esoteric’s reissues to review, each containing just one bonus track.
There’s the mighty B-side “Long Gone Geek” on A Salty Dog and the radio edit of “Whiskey Train” on Home. Both CDs are available in two-disc
editions with about a dozen bonus tracks each: mostly BBC sessions and live
cuts on Salty Dog and backing tracks
and alternate takes on Home.
Obviously, I can’t comment on those, but I’m still confident that Esoteric’s
Procol Harum reissues will rank among this year’s best reissues for sound
alone.
