Love Maker –  Abe (reviewed by Dave Franklin)

Looking forward to see where you are going is all very well and good, sometimes though it is fun to look back and remind yourself where you have come from. If you can do that without necessarily revisiting the exact same sonic ground, that perhaps visits the spaces between the footsteps of the original journey then that is even better. Love Maker retraces the journey that took blues music into the realms of modern rock and whilst it is certainly familiar in its sonic style, somehow it also bring something new to the table.

It embraces the free form chaos of the 60’s cosmic country, blues jammers and the same decades dystopian Doorsian vibes, the groove and drive of 70’s heavy rockers, has the weight and grunt of later grungers and the windswept aspects of the desert rock scene. In fact as it plays with the dynamic of the loud/quiet and the fast/slow template, it wanders through a lot of interesting territory. 

But if you really wanted to nail things down, this is the sound of being comatose on a Persian rug wrapped in a drug fug in the basement of a Ladbroke Grove squat in about 1966. The sounds are warm and exotic, psychedelic, trippy and full of otherness, they rub shoulders with the acid laced sound of  West Coast acts such as Jefferson Airplane and wash over you like the musky smoke from a hookah pipe.

It certainly rocks, it laces itself with sonic intricacies and hooky riffs, it stomps hypnotically and occasionally races ahead of its own though patterns before raining itself back in. Love Maker might seem like a thing of the past but perhaps in the cyclical nature of music it is just ahead of its time. Either way you are going to need a slow spliff to explore its wonderful looseness and acid soaked heart. Warning: Do try this at home.