Hymn Of The Seventh Galaxy - Return to Forever

Nov

26

Hymn Of The Seventh Galaxy - Return to Forever

≡ Category: 1970s, Classics That I Hate, Fusion, Reviews |
≅ Written by: Michael Kydonieus

Rating:

CLASSICS THAT I HATE

Somebody’s got to say it: Hymn of the Seventh Galaxy is the sort of uninspired drivel that hastened the decline of fusion as an artistically viable form of musical expression.

It fails on every possible level. The arrangements are busy all right, but it’s all sound and fury, signifying nothing. The grooves are the sort of thing a talented 10-year-old might come up with, trying to be really cool. Most tragic of all are the would-be guitar heroics of Bill Connors. It’s all bluster and no content. Rock contemporaries like Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, and Ritchie Blackmore wiped the floor with this guy.

After Hymn of the Seventh Galaxy came out, Connor quit the band to concentrate on a more personal style with acoustic ECM label efforts such as Theme to the Guardian, Of Mist and Melting, and Swimming With a Hole In My Body. Good move.

The nadir of Hymn of the Seventh Galaxy has to be Space Circus Part II, which is so memorably moronic, you’ll be desperate to dislodge it from your brain.

Really, Hymn of the Seventh Galaxy inspires awe. How can four master musicians like Chick Corea (keys), Stanley Clarke (bass), Bill Connors (guitar), and Lenny White (drums) produce something this irredeemably wretched? Maybe Chick Corea and Stanley Clarke were inspired by the music of L. R. Hubbard, the Grand Poobah of Scientology, who was rumored to play a mean pipe organ.